The Optimal Girl
by UnsupervisedLearner
Summary: The government has decreed that love is an equation. Misaki Takasaki is the most beautiful girl in my school, although for years I've never worked up the courage to confess to her. I'd rather toss your dice in with "love by linear algebra" and dream that the Yukari system assigns me and her together. But what separates a dream from a nightmare?
1. Love is an Inflection Point

_Five years ago_

My life before I met Misaki Takasaki.

It was quite something.

I dragged myself onto the wooden park bench, gripping the splintering edge so hard it dug into my hands and extracted rivulets of blood. I wiped tears from my eyes, staining one side of my sleeve with tears and the other with blood dripping down from my raw palm. I hated wearing short sleeves - the long sleeves hid the purple bruises swelling along my arms. Even as I rubbed my face against my arm, it bumped against the contusions and spiked yet more pain. The harder I squeezed my hands, the less pain I felt, however. It gave me a focal point to drown out the roar of the rest of the world.

Before me, the silhouettes of the city blurred into a phantasmagoria of floating, multicolored lights. Blurred through the watery film over my eyes, then tears. I stooped my head and cupped my hands into it and began to cry. Really cry, not the tears that streamed down my face in silence for the past hour. The messy kind that caused me to wipe accidental snot dripping from my nose, the kind that made me scream like I was trying to cough out my soul, until my throat felt like a desert and I could taste the blood pooling in the back of it.

Not that anyone could hear it. I picked this spot because I had seen it empty so many times on the way back from school.

I cast a furtive glance over each of my shoulders, to check for strangers sure, but also to check for her presence. My circumspection would forbid me to do this in ordinary circumstances, but the bile had built within my raging heart and pounded from within like an overcapacity nitrogen canister.

"I HATE YOU!" I screamed at the world. It doesn't come out as impressive as I would have liked, having already frayed my voice into a hoarse thread of its former self, but I croaked it out with my remaining effort.

_"__What's the integral of the hyperbolic tangent function?"_

_"__Logarithm of hyperbolic cosine!" a proud, cheery voice answered. _

_"__Plus. C!" THWACK. "You forgot the constant, you sloppy, irresponsible child!"._

I scrunched up my eyes even more, as if closing them could block the images and sounds playing through within my head.

_"__What is the contour integral of 1/z around the origin in the complex plane?"._

_A slightly more hesitant voice stuttered out, "I think it's…two…pi…i?"._

_THWACK. _

_"__It's negative 2πi! The contour in the diagram is clockwise! Eugh, no wonder you haven't been able to learn the Cauchy-Goursat proof for the past hour! How will you ever do math being so careless, my own child? What a shame!"._

I shook my head, trying to shake out the memories. My brain thrashed within my skull, hurting.

_This time I was off by one on my index in the power series solutions to a regular singular differential equation I solved with the type II method of Frobenius. _

_By now I had come to expect it. My mother bemoaned nothing now. I stretched out my arms. _

_THWACK. _

_The wooden ruler shattered, digging splinters into my forearms and gashing them with the remaining toothlike edge. It raked my crimson flesh open like a tiger's claw, but in the instant after I could only feel a sting. Blood dripped, dripped, dripped down onto the textbook, moistening the pages with red. _

_Disarmed, my frustrated mother grunted, picked up the textbook, and tossed it at my cranium. The book split down the spine. _

I wanted to stop the tears so much, I pressed my red-smeared fingers against my eyes until I thought they might burst. That maybe the pressure might dam away the effluence pouring forth. I tried to breathe, but the air passing against my abraded throat induced me to cough and made it worse, and I had to slow down.

_My legs buckled under me as I jumped to bump back the volleyball. I crashed onto my ribs, ringing them with pain, although they held - I think. But I also fell onto my arms, purple splotches exposed by the accursed short sleeves on the gym uniform, and it hurt so much I couldn't use them to get up._

_The other team scored a point. _

_My teammates mouthed things at me, but the pain filtered most of them out of my conscious focus. _

_"__Come on scab-scum, why you got to be so clumsy all the time?"._

_"__It's a miracle a kid as clumsy as you is still alive."_

_"__What are you good for besides taking tests? Do you do anything else?"._

_"__Come on, why don't you say something?"._

_I said nothing, and smiled back, hoping the other students looming over me go away. _

Maybe they were right. What was I good for?

Taking tests. Doing homework. What did it matter, anyway? To get into a "good school", where smug kids made fun of me for my injuries and the persona of clumsiness I crafted out of lies because I didn't want my mom to go to jail.

I didn't want to go to a "good school" anymore.

I didn't want to go to school anymore.

I didn't want to…anymore.

I gazed upon the city skyline before me, beyond the railing. I rose, approached the railing, ran its cold, jagged rust underneath my fingertips.

I looked down the grassy incline - not steep enough, I thought, to do it…

"Excuse me~" a delicate voice drifted towards me, like a flower petal dancing in the breeze.

I stiffened and snapped my slouch into posture and whirled around to face the unexpected visitor. For a moment I worried it might be my mother.

Instead, the angel before me almost seemed to glow per se in the twilight's fading orange-blue light. A royal blue dress fluttered like a patriotic flag with her short black hair, the ends of which curled into a playful arcs below her chin. She was a kid back then, as was I, but even then the heavens had planted the recognizable seeds of her peerless resplendence.

A smile too perfect for reality, the kind I would only see on TV, adorned her face, until she saw me and modulated it into the exact appropriate frown of concern that I needed in this moment. Her wide-open eyes, dark and abstruse, relaxed to match. She took a seat on the bench, careful to avoid the bloodstains, and beckoned me to join her.

"Is something wrong?" she queried. A plainly nugatory inquiry, as she could tell just from looking over me, and yet I needed it.

I could only nod. Tears and grief so clouded my vision and mind that I couldn't even bring myself to feel embarrassed presenting myself like this in front of a stranger. Oh sure, I've seen her before, in the distance, as an unreachable background character of my life. A cheery, popular girl at my school from afar, always smiling and laughing and surrounded by friends. Two feet away, however, her beauty nearly suffocated me, and I wondered how I never remembered or interacted with her.

She gazed down at the city with me, her countenance melting into a distant melancholy, almost as if she forgot my presence.

Yet somehow, something about her mien reassured me that she didn't.

"Yeah," she continued, "something is wrong." She craned her head to look up at the sky, swinging her legs from the bench. "You understand, don't you?".

I didn't. I didn't even know what she's talking about.

"I'm a loser," I admitted, albeit with some difficulty next to this angel on Earth. "I think you're the most popular girl in our year. What could I understand?".

"Hmmm…" she hummed, before turning her starless night-colored eyes towards me. So deep, so large - I almost wanted to step into them and discover what's behind them.

"More than you think," she replied. "Sometimes, at home…with my family…I also want to cry and scream like you."

"Why don't you?" I asked.

"I think…" she began, trailing off to find the correct way to finish her thought. "I think, if you have a choice between doing that, and something else, then surely something else is better?".

"And what is that something else?" I pleaded, inching closer to her in desperation.

"Hmmm…"

She dropped silent for a good half-minute, tracing the bands and swirls of clouds in the starless firmament into patterns only she could see. I dared not interrupt, when she broke it with a nervous laugh.

"I don't know if you'll understand…it's not very logical…maybe I was just desperate…" she disclaimed. "But there's this boy…he gave me an eraser in fifth period once when I forgot mine."

"I don't get it," I replied. "Is it somebody I know?".

"Probably not, although I don't know who you know," she answered. "I…think I love him. And whenever I feel down, I try to think of him, and even when things are really terrible, it warms me up and makes me smile. It's like turning on a flashlight in the dark, or a lighter in the cold."

"It's useful," she added. "It's precious."

"Huh," I mused. "I'm sorry, I don't get it."

The girl smiled. "Maybe one day you'll get lucky too, and you will. Maybe you'll be better than me and have enough courage to…tell whoever it is about this."

"Gah!" she exclaimed, "Why am I telling you this!?". She extended out her pinky towards me. "Promise me you'll never tell anyone else, or…that's evil!"

I wrapped my pinky arounds hers and shook on it. "I promise - what's your name, actually?".

"Takasaki," she provided, with a grin and a head tilt.

"Reader," I replied.

"Reader-kun…" she enunciated. "Hey, I don't think we've met, but I always see your name at the top of the exam score lists! I don't know about you, but I think that's really cool! You should be proud of it, it's not easy. I should know, I'm not all that much good at studying myself…just never seems to stick."

"Love is just one example," she concluded, "just find something positive to be thankful for in your life that'll bring a smile to your face!".

"You think…it's cool?" I repeated, savoring the unfamiliar word.

"Yeah," she confirmed. "You should keep up the good work, it'll make you successful one day."

I couldn't help but crack a smile even in my despondency and my disheveled state, causing Takasaki to reciprocate.

"Well, I hope that helped." She rose and took a bow, hands together.

"Yeah…thanks, Takasaki-san."

"No problem. I always want to make people happy…even if myself - actually, forget that, bye!"

She nodded one last time, and then turned away, as my tears dried and long-unused, fatigued muscles contorted my mouth into a smile.

_"__You mixed up your totally antisymmetric Levi-Civita tensor of rank three again! How are you ever going to express cross products in Einstein notation!"_

_THWACK. _

_I gripped the ruler in my hand, arresting it mid-strike. The metal straight-edge dug into my palm, but I ignored it to wrest it away from my mother. Examining the instrument in disgust, I threw it away and it clattered against the wall. _

_I thought I could hear applause, and I turned. My mind could almost see Takasaki on a fold-out chair, rising to clap and smile for me. She mouthed some words - my best guess was "good job"._

_For the first time in my life, I wanted to hug a girl. _

* * *

Author's Note: This is a crosspost of "The Optimal Girl", edited into first person to comply with FFN's policies.

Disclaimer: I do not own Koi to Uso & will comply with any legal order from its creators. Any reference to real life entities not intended to convey author's opinion outside storytelling purposes. This fic is not investment advice, solicitation of securities/derivatives business, or a campaign contribution. By reading, reader absolves author of all criminal/civil harm under laws, regulations, or SRO/firm rules, etc. Disclaimer applies to all chapters or reproductions even when not included.


	2. Love is a Quantum Entanglement

_Present Day_

The chalk danced in my fingers, screeching against the blackboard and shedding streaks of itself onto it. White dust flew into the air, settling onto the dark sleeve of my uniform jacket like an exploded bag of flour. The individual orange rays of the sun's last light revealed themselves as they streamed through the classroom window and the Tyndall effect scattered them through the suspended particulate.

It coated my hands like the aftermath of an overindulgence in powdered donuts, but the drying grip mixed with the sweat of my focused enthusiasm. My hand cramped from the restless scribbling, but I barely noticed, and only scrunched my fingers around the chalk harder to block it out. It felt familiar, elemental to me.

I was careful to avoid swallowing any of the dust, but my throat already felt chalky from all my excited babbling in front of the near empty classroom. My red uniform tie around my neck didn't help matters, even after I loosened it as much as I could without appearing disheveled.

The three disinterested faces of my fellow physics club members gaped slack-jawed back at me amidst misaligned, pushed-aside wooden desks and seats. Koharu insisted on sitting in his usual second-to-last window spot as if he inhabited some anime, his feet propped up on a non-parallel desk. Michiru followed along, albeit not to my words, but rather in silence to her accompanying textbook while twirling a lock of her red hair. Sasahara tried to listen at first, as his open and half-filled notebook attested, but I lost him and now he devoted himself to balancing a pencil on top of an eraser. Traces of the smell of pizza wafted from a now-empty box on the teacher's desk beside me.

The disarray nearly prompted me to stop and straighten every last item of furniture, but to interrupt my proof midway would have disgruntled me even more. They would never show such blatant disrespect to an actual teacher - but alas, I only captained the school's physics team as a mere fellow student, and it was my turn to give the weekly after-school free-form team lecture.

My father suggested that smiling could attract more of my audience's attention, so I tried morphing my stern mouth for a moment, before giving up after noticing no immediate effect. It's not that my fellow teammates had no interest in physics, but I was babbling on about a topic beyond even a physics acolyte's comprehension and which only showed up in maybe the final question at the competitions. I glanced at the esoteric, meaningless argot I've decorated all over the board: squiggles, forks, h's stabbed through, angles. Except to me they all had their own ineluctable meanings: Feynman diagrams, psi wavefunctions, reduced Planck's constant, Dirac bra-ket inner products.

"By adding an annihilator tensor, and taking the Hermitian for its creator, we can model the creation of quark-antiquark pairs in imaginary quantum time," I concluded with a few finishing strokes, "we can relate the Wilson loop expectation value to the static quark potential, and after taking sufficiently large time, thus derive a roughly linear relationship between it and distance, thus proving asymptotic freedom, and this should give some intuition on color confinement as well."

Sasahara raised his hand, and I obliged him with a point.

"Hey Reader," he called out, "do you think you could just give a simpler explanation? As Stephen Hawking once said, every equation halves the sale of a book."

"Why are we even talking about this stuff anyway? We still need to practice the easy level pulleys and frictionless ramps and elastic balls - you know, a level appropriate for a high school competition," Koharu added.

I nodded in reluctant acquiescence. The club had taken turns discussing those topics for the past few weeks, but I had thought of today's particle physics as a rewarding side-jaunt. I supposed it would have been too much to expect anyone else to enjoy it.

"The strong nuclear force holds together the nuclei of atoms. It's the strongest fundamental force, and it behaves weirdly compared to what you'd expect. In this case, it gets stronger as you move the two particles apart, and that's called asymptotic freedom."

"You sure it's not love?" Michiru chimed in. "Strongest force in the universe, gets stronger the further away you become."

Koharu chortled in agreement. I rolled my eyes, but I couldn't help but let out a muffled chuckle myself at her joke.

"As for color confinement," I continued, "it means that quarks, which the nuclei of atoms are made of, cannot be alone. They have to be bundled into a bigger particle with at least one other quark, to form a meson or baryon."

"Awww," Michiru purred.

"It's just like the government marriage notices, forcing you to be with someone," Koharu quipped while staring out the window.

"Is that all you think about ever since you turned 16?" Michiru snapped. "Way to rain on the vibe."

Koharu swerved his gaze back to her, lifting his palms in defeat. "Hey, you would too."

"Guys, guys," I interjected, trying to wave off the distractions, "let's get back to the topic at - "

The sunlight crawled through the open doorway, falling upon her as she walked by in the hallway, right as I caught a glimpse. It skipped across the shoulder-length curtains of her onyx-carved hair like across the shimmering surface of a pond at sunset, curling at the very ends and framing a pale, gentle face. She hid behind eyes colored with lonely, roiled deep ocean that sparkled in the light and wore a politician's smile, the impeccable and impossibly beautiful kind I knew was not meant for me.

She paused, then glided into the classroom, her blue plaid uniform miniskirt lilting behind her. She always rolled it up a few centimeters shorter - out of personal style, or vanity, who knew? - and I could not help but notice every time I looked. In her slender, delicate, surgeon's fingertips she clasped a limp piece of paper, and with her others she brushed aside a few strands of hair from the side of her face.

"T-Taka-Takasaki-san," I stuttered out, performing a quick bow. My legs shivered and I clasped my hands together, as if a sudden chill had entered the room. Yet I felt a sense of warm pride standing before the backdrop of my tangle of equations.

"Reader-kun~" she incanted in her soft, melting melody. My heart started racing just to hear my name clothed in such a gorgeous finery, and only accelerated when I started to worry whether she could hear it.

"Yes, of course - why did you decide to stop by?" I mumbled, my lecturer's composure dissolved.

"Reader-kun," - this was just a generous second helping - "I thought you might be the single best person I could ask about this. Could you help me with this problem on the homework?". She passed me the worksheet, and I accepted it with both hands. I felt my mathematical aptitude suddenly useful, as if endowed only to serve her in this moment.

_"__Find the area bounded by the following function: r = 1 - sin(θ)"_

"Of course! Any time, feel free," I shouted with a dumb grin stretching across my face. I normally did not entertain pedestrian requests for homework help. Such a waste of my intellect, like asking Mozart to tune my piano. And people would take advantage of me if I did not forcefully reject such requests.

But I would have preferred it if Takasaki were to "take advantage" of me more often.

I picked up the chalk I had set down on the sill, but before I even pressed it against the board, I blurted out, "the answer is three pi over two."

"Hmmm, thanks," Takasaki replied, "I appreciate the efficiency, but I need to know for the test, too. I was wondering if you could actually teach me how to do it?".

I raised my palm and buried it in my face. Any contrivance to excuse spending more time with her - how did I not think of it?

"Of course, Takasaki-san," I obliged. "The only trick in this problem is using an integral on a function in polar coordinates."

I pointed to the pizza box. "A normal integral just slices up a box into really thin strips and adds them together. A polar integral would take, let's say the pizza, and cut it into slices."

I reconsidered the analogy for a moment. "For something like calculus, where we chop it into really tiny pieces, you might actually want to imagine something like a wedding cake where you're trying to divide it among a hundred - "

"….Wedding cake?" Takasaki mused to herself, her eyes becoming distant. The tiniest corner of the ebullient twinkle on her lips began to melt down into a frown.

I tried to dismiss the thought with a frantic wave, then clasped my own hands together. "Wait, no forget about that, bad analogy, didn't mean it!"

Then I realized how suspicious my apology seemed, and added, "I hope you're not worried about turning sixteen soon or anything."

"I already did," she clarified, "but I haven't received my government notice yet."

She grinned and shrugged. "No sense in worrying about it, it'll come when it comes, I suppose? The system tries its best, after all!".

I tried my best to cobble together my own nervous smile to reflect hers, running my hand through the back of my hair.

"Yeah, I guess, haha…anyway, to continue…a circle's area is pi r^2, and going around the circle is two pi radians. Half of the area is pi/2 r^2, and going half around is pi - both just halved. So you can tell the area is angle/2 r^2. So for a really tiny angle slice dθ, the slice's area is dθ/2 r^2, and you take the integral of that. So r in this case is just…"

I drew a cross set of axes, took a look at the _"r = 1 - sin(θ)"_ function, and computed the trigonometry in my head. I clicked down the chalk at a few representative points, then connected the dots to reveal…a heart.

At this moment, I felt as if mathematics itself had betrayed me.

"I swear, that's just what the function you asked me about really looks like! I'm not making it up, or anything!" I disclaimed with another fervent wave. I dropped my piece of chalk and its clattered to the floor, breaking in two. Takasaki said nothing in response but a wan smile.

I picked up the longer remaining end, and bashed out the trig identities and antiderivatives in a whirl and a babble fast enough to make a pharmaceutical side effects announcer proud. My chalk shattered again with the sheer inelegant force I applied it with to the board, and I continued with the stub until I finished and took a bow.

"I…I hope that answers your question!".

I remembered my teammates' existence and could feel their stares boring down into me, the flustered team instructor. No, this incident reminded them that I was just a normal fellow student like them.

Takasaki nodded, taking back the now-slightly creased paper and bowing.

"Thank you, Reader-kun, that really saved me!" she replied. "You really are as good at explaining as my friends say you are."

"Anything else you want to say, Rea - " Sasahara began, before my poison-coated glare silenced him.

With that, Takasaki performed a frictionless turn on her foot and skipped out, and I breathed a sigh of relief.

"Wowww," Michiru drew out. "You're always sooo rude to people who ask you for homework help."

I took a second to close my eyes and exhaled, as if that would melt away the implication of Michiru's words, and then punctuated it with a clap and a weak grin.

"He he he...alright, team meeting's over. Hope you found today's lecture fun enough, and see you all bright and early tomorrow!" Everyone complied, Koharu rushing out and the others shoving their belongings back into their bags. Sasahara patted my shoulder on the way out and nodded, and I returned the gestures.

Seeing Takasaki filled my heart with joy. Being of service to her even moreso. And yet also young, heart-pounding anxiety.

And maybe, even if I didn't want to admit it to yourself, inevitable, futile sadness.

* * *

Author's Note: Happy holidays everyone. I'm sure everyone did that r=1-sinθ trick on their graphing calculators to their crushes in high school, although maybe I have a biased sample.

See disclaimer in chapter 1.


	3. Love is a Non-Monic Morphism

I stepped through the hallways deserted for the weekend chess tournament, a sometime minor hobby of mine between the math and physics teams competitions. My footsteps echoed against the tiles, and I ran my hand against the cool glass windows. Rain spattered outside, casting pallid blue remnants of outdoor light into the otherwise unlit corridor.

Happy sixteenth birthday to me.

I sighed and turned towards the window, and I could only imagine the faint reflection of Takasaki glittering back at me. A clock ticked away the seconds in the distance behind me. I would get my Yukari Law government marriage partner notice any day now, and soon the matter would wither and bury itself.

Who could the government assign to me? I tried to envisage someone in the abstract, but again I could only meander back to her face. I only had that one precious conversation with her five years ago, and scattered interactions hither and thither in the intervening time. With provable probable surety any other girl that the government's algorithms deemed optimal and compatible for yme could build and share more meaningful experiences and rationales in two weeks than that. Nonetheless…I never felt this way before or after for any girl besides Takasaki. It had happened all of a sudden, for a small and unconvincing reason, and I could only explain the broadest outlines of how it had transpired. I inclined myself against doubting the power of AI algorithms. Not only from my personal mathematical literacy, but also my father's work as a former vice president at Facebook and now as head of the data science team for the Yukari system. And yet, the idea that a computer could cough out a pairing and make it happen on the spot struck me as incredible.

Still, the statistics didn't lie, at worst only grossly distort the truth. Yukari marriages plummeted divorce rates over natural ones by a statistically significant margin, and Japan's birthrate increased and averted demographic and financial catastrophe according to the IMF. I exhaled again.

It would probably turn out ok.

Shaking the thoughts out of my head, I pushed open the door and entered the classroom. Chessboard mats blanketed many of the neat rows of desks, although only four have people sitting at them. The competition had winnowed the field to the last few rounds. Three pairs of pairs of eyes, mostly from other schools, glared at me from the other desks. One particular pair of eyes regarded me with even more foot-tapping impatience.

The last one had honey-colored twin-tails swaying down the sides of her small head. They framed expressive, innocent eyes that leak through every thought rattling in her brain, and an unsure mouth that opted to express an unfortunate default of unintentional contempt. I judged her to possess an innate cuteness, although not the ability or desire to convey it. Her outfit, an incongruous yet endearing gothic lolita dress, only confirmed her either neophyte or deliberate nonconformism.

I approached her and bowed before taking a seat across from her. I was playing black this round, not that going second bothered me. I appreciated the challenge and played a better defense anyway, waiting for the opponent to tire and make a mistake.

"I'm Firstname Reader," I introduced myself. "And you are - ?"

"Ririna Sanada," she answered.

"Sanada-mushi [tapeworm]?" one of the students at another table jeered, earning a glare from Ririna. She gritted her mouth into a definite show of intentional contempt now.

"I've seen your name on the top of the tournament lists," she added, turning back to me. "I look forward to playing you."

I opened my arms and leaned back my chair, teetering it on its legs. "I could say the same for you, Sanada-san. Now then, I'm sure the other tables would like to start, so let's - "

There's a knock at the door, prompting groans from the other players, until the guest peeked in with a sheepish "Excuse me," and silenced them all with her awing beauty.

"T-T-Takasaki-san?" I stammered out, the ruminations I had shoved aside earlier bursting forth and trampling my brain once again. She wore a pastel pink blouse with a loose ruffled bow sprawled over her collar area and a white tennis miniskirt of a rather appealing length, and it struck me how I had never seen her outside her school uniform beyond that initial conversation many years ago.

I shot a quick glance at Ririna, her eyes just as wide open in surprise as mine. I could conclude she did not contrive this to throw me off balance before the game. But that still didn't explain why Takasaki had shown up out of the blue.

"Takasaki-san?" Ririna repeated. "I thought you were with Nejima-kun today?".

Takasaki tittered behind a nervous smirk. "Oh, he's actually hanging out with Nisaka."

She turned to me, and I almost wilted under the spotlight burning from her attention.

"Reader-kun, do you have a moment? Actually, a bit more than a moment?" she inquired, and time stood still.

"Does it have to be n- " the duty-bound part of me began, before the rest of me tackled it back down.

Takasaki needed me for something.

Besides, her unanticipated pulchritude had annihilated my ability to think even a move ahead for the game in front of me, smearing my mental tree of strategic possibilities. And in life as well, although all indications screamed towards only one possible action anyway. I shifted my eyes towards my king and queen looming over the rest of the pieces on my side of the board.

With a backhand slap, I knocked over my king to indicate my resignation.

"Hey!" Ririna yelped out, slamming the desk and jiggering the pieces from the impact.

"Sorry," I apologized as my chair screeched against the floor and I skipped over to the door. "Maybe next time," I dismissed with a salute. I could only see Takasaki leaning against the door, frozen in time.

"Thank you for waiting," I expressed to her for the mere thirty-second ordeal. "How do you and Ririna know each other?".

"We know each other from…a mutual acquaintance," she summarized, staring ahead. "Did you bring an umbrella?".

I patted down my pockets, even though they're logically too small to fit one, and realized the sun had shined all morning when I got here. Sasahara had even texted me with an all-clear forecast for the whole day then. Which means…

I failed to muster the courage to say the answer, but my nervous frown and frantic eyes told it all.

Takasaki began a sigh, before recovering her smile and saying nothing for a good fifteen seconds as the two of us approached the entrance. Finally, she picked up a pink umbrella to match her top from one of the racks besides the lockers, shook a few residual drops off of it, and looked to me.

"I have one. Did you bring a rain jacket?".

I shook my head.

"Then…we can use it," she concluded. I bolted ahead of her to open the door for her, and as she exited she swung out the umbrella and opened it over the both of us. A few drops caught my uniform's shoulder, but I dared not inch closer to Takasaki. Even now, I was close enough to hear her soft breaths. I was close enough to see light reflecting off her deep, impenetrable eyes, and gathered a clue on what goes behind them.

My shoulder was only a centimeter away from hers, so close I concentrated every passing moment on not bumping into her, and I was too terrified to say a word. I've been too terrified to really say anything of substance to her all these years.

The first time I had met her, we had both exchanged our honest selves, and hints of our honest thoughts and even an honest secret. Now I found myself unable to summon the courage to even initiate a conversation about the weather. Granted, a rather dreary subject at the moment, but at least something else. School? Clubs? Hobbies? Anything of the nothing in common I realized I share with the girl next to me right now.

I had five years. I did nothing, said nothing. Even now, the precious moments walking right next to her, which I might never get again, ticked away with a deafening loudness in my head. I deflated into a useless, incogent, awkward heap when I saw her. What had changed from that first meeting?

I knew the answer: I fell in love with her.

She became my angel, and angels resided in the unreachable.

And I really, really could have gone without this blazing, unignorable reminder on my sixteenth birthday.

"So…why did you come to get me? What do you need, Takasaki-san?" I asked, more quiet than usual, and amazed that I accomplished it at all. Still, factual curiosity could override awkward terror.

"Oh, I was specifically informed that you would only leave the tournament early if I came to ask, for some reason," she sidestepped.

"Careful, puddle," I pointed out as we crossed an intersection, and Takasaki nodded in appreciation. Whoever had "informed" her of this, probably Michiru come to think of it…_"for some reason."_ Only idiots and the willfully blind could not draw the line from that to the obvious conclusion, and to call Takasaki either of those was beyond me.

"So where are we going? This is the route to my house." I might have had more questions or theories of varying shades if we two were walking towards the local government office or our high school, but at this point I guessed it's just a surprise birthday party and I relaxed.

"Indeed."

Yep, definitely a surprise birthday party. But more importantly:

"You know where I live?" I asked, with perhaps too much optimistic incredulity soaking into my voice.

"Google Maps is quite a thing," she replied, "and I was provided with your address."

"Also," she added, scooting into even more uncomfortable proximity to me and waving in with her right hand, "your shoulder is getting wet, why don't you come in."

I slid in behind her to avoid a collision, biting my lip at how we must have looked.

"So…" I trailed off. "How's, um, school going?" I offered.

She beamed and turned back towards me, causing me to point to another puddle ahead.

"Oh actually, I did really well on the calculus test thanks to your explanation the other day!" she exclaimed, and I couldn't help but reflect her joy myself.

"You actually found it helpful?".

"Yeah, definitely!" she affirmed. "I think you'd have a lot of talent as a teacher or professor some day, if that's what you want to do. You have such an honest and nice disposition, I bet your students would love you."

Oh, a few words deleted in that last sentence would have changed my world. If only.

But still, I was having an actual conversation with Misaki Takasaki again! My heart jumped and I was almost sure she could hear it this close to me, accelerating it further.

"Oh, thank you!" I replied. "I agree, yeah, being a teacher would be nice, I would like it a lot. But, I think I need to do something a bit more…lucrative in this economy, no? It's quite expensive these days to raise a family. Maybe I could my skills to better personal use as a hedge fund manager or founder or something."

I winced as I realized I might have wanted to come across as less pecuniary to Takasaki.

"Oh, I think that's awesome," she said instead. "You've always struck me as the ambitious kind. And, unlike me, you can probably achieve yours too."

"You're plenty talented, Takasaki-san!" I interjected. "What do you want to do, anyway?"

"Oh, really?" Her eyebrows perked up. "Why don't you name a few?".

"Well…" I was starting to regret my earlier bravado, as though I was sure my wonderful angel had many, I struggled to put them into words. And, as my mind bitterly tried to push away, I didn't really know her that well.

"Well, Takasaki-san, you're really popular, and everyone likes you and gets along with you. You know how to make people happy or feel better, even when it's difficult or not obvious - that's got to count for something, right? And I'd say it's pretty valuable and helpful. And you're memorable, even from a distance or from talking to you once."

"Also," I appended, "I'm not sure, um, whether it's appropriate to say, but, at least in my opinion - I mean, just from the general consensus from most people in the school, you know - I think, I mean, most people think, you're really pretty."

Takasaki beamed. "That's great to hear! I'm glad to know that someone thinks I'm useful like that."

"So, what would you like to do when you grow up?" I repeated from earlier.

"I don't know yet, we're just first-years," she deflected.

"We have to submit our first drafts of career plan forms soon, surely you've given it some thought."

"Well…I think you described my ambition just now, no? Or at least its prerequisites."

I tilted my head in confusion. "I don't believe so. So you do have one after all."

Takasaki sighed. "I'm a bit embarrassed to say…people might laugh…"

I curled my pinky around hers, causing her to jerk her focus down towards it in surprise, and I swung our arms together once and withdraw. The brief contact felt cold and soft, just as I remembered all those years ago.

"I promise," I declared.

Takasaki nodded, staring up off far away into the crying sky. "I guess I want to be a politician…I'd like to run in the National Diet for a seat in the House of Representatives, maybe…maybe even become prime minister of Japan, if…if I can do it."

"Wow!" I exclaimed, "That's awesome! Aim high, Takasaki-san!".

"I don't think I can do it," she muttered, rubbing her neck. "I'm just an unremarkable high school girl…and Japan's never had a girl prime minister anyway…just something I'd wish to do."

"Hey," I interrupted, stopping. "Turn and look at me."

She complied, and I stared into her ocean-colored eyes. If she were a guy friend I might have grabbed her shoulders for tactile punctuation, but that seemed too forward in this particular circumstance.

"You're plenty amazing, Takasaki-san. Maybe some people are smarter or whatever, but there's no one else like you in the world. You're your own unique probability outcome, and you have the chance to do anything you set your mind to, but people will only believe in you if you believe in yourself. "

She flashed a smile. Not one of her perfect ones, this one tainted with a bit of cynical hesitation tempering the ends of the curve, but it made it all the more real and it feels directly for me.

"Thank you, Reader-kun."

"So, what would you want to do as Prime Minister?".

"We're here," she announced, pointing a finger towards my house. I thought we had at least a few more minutes until we arrived, but as Einstein's general relativity predicts, time dilates near an extreme gravitational attraction.

"I know what's inside and what they're going to say to me," I said as the two of us go up the steps to the door, "but it doesn't make it any less moving."

I ring the doorbell. Footsteps shuffled inside. A muffled "Everyone get ready," leaked through, followed by silence.

The door sprung open, and Michiru glanced from Takasaki to me under the same umbrella with a devious smirk. Koharu and Sasahara and others and streamers and cake were behind her. I felt a warmth creep inside knowing my friends had planned all this for me, down to the Takasaki invite, and I rested my hand over my heart.

"Surprise!" we yelled at each other.

* * *

Author's Note: Apologies for the late update, I got back home from work after midnight last night. The characters in Koi to Uso are really great - I really like Takasaki, but I personally identify with Ririna a lot.

See disclaimer in chapter 1.


	4. Love is a Prisoner's Dilemma

I laughed into my fist, holding a gold-rimmed china plate of half-eaten strawberry shortcake in my other hand.

"Oh man, I really can't see Koharu doing that," I commented to Sasahara. He and I leaned against the kitchen counter, which the others surrounded, and I traced the random striations of the dark granite with my finger. Rain pattered onto the leaves of the small cherry tomato garden right outside the glass sliding doors. "I would have expected Michiru to go out and shop for the cake."

"Yeah, you learn something new about him every day, don't you."

"Say," I leaned towards my friend, almost whispering, "why didn't you tell me it was going to rain later today when I was chatting with you this morning?".

Sasahara smirked, then shifted his eyes towards Takasaki chatting with Michiru in the corner.

"Really?" I asked, "you really planned this all along?".

"Well, it worked, didn't it?" he countered with a snicker.

"So," he added, "are you going to tell her?".

I jerked my head towards him. "Wait, what? Tell her what?".

"If you don't want people to know, you should really do a better job of hiding it."

"Hiding what?" I denied, flustered. Even now, my defensive tone and reddening cheeks betrayed it all against my will.

"I'm telling you, you should tell her," he prompted again.

"What's the point?" I exhaled, setting aside the slice of cake onto the island and looking outside. "I'm turning sixteen today. My government notice will fall out of the sky any day now."

"Precisely, what's the point in not telling her?" he pointed out. "It's not like you interact with her much anyway or have a friendship you can ruin. And it'll be meaningless anyway, she'll understand."

That last line stung, even though it represented the truth. Especially so, actually. I appreciated my friend's honesty

"What if she feels the same way?" I asked with much more optimism than I deserved.

Sasahara chuckled and swung an arm around my shoulders to bring me in. "Look man, I want to stick up for you and all and as your friend, but we're men of science and numbers. You know what the numbers look like for a girl as hot as Misaki Takasaki."

"Trust me, you'll feel better wrapping up the whole thing before the government marries you off to whoever their algorithms and neural networks and whatever else your dad works on spit out for you."

I couldn't help but notice his indulgence in a wistful, quarter-second glance at Michiru and her short sweeps of red hair. She had gotten her government notice to someone in a different school a few weeks ago, and I still remembered the glint in Sasahara's eye when he offered her a muted "Congratulations".

"You sound like you're speaking from personal experience," I poked back without trying for too much of an explicit accusation.

"Nah, just common advice," he denied, not even acknowledging my suspicion. He patted me on the back. "Go for it."

My eyes swept for Takasaki, when I noticed her leaning against the entryway to the kitchen, thumbing through her phone, and rolling her way out. I gave Sasahara a look, who nodded, and then chased after her. When I caught up to her, she was picking out her Mary Jane shoes amongst the small pile in the entryway.

"Ah, Takasaki-san," I called out.

"Oh, Reader-kun, hey," she replied, caught unawares. "Sorry about leaving early - I invited you and stayed a bit because Michiru asked me. I have to catch some friends now, but I hope you don't mind."

"Yeah, it's fine." I averted my eyes downward, staring at the shoes pile, and clasped my hands behind my back.

"Hey, Takasaki-san, before you go, do you have a moment? To talk?" I mumbled out.

"Yeah, sure," she obliged unsuspecting, wearing her ubiquitous polite smile. "What about?".

"Do you remember what we talked about?" I asked.

"About our futures?" she clarified.

"No, no. When we first met, five years ago."

"Yeah, of course. I always remember," she replied. "It was a difficult time, anyway," she added in a lower, ancillary mutter.

I took a deep breath, and lifted my head to meet her eyes. They sparkled even in the rain-colored semi-darkness. I could do this much given what I had prepared myself to say. The rain drummed outside the door in the otherwise silence between the two of us.

I felt a chill flowing through my blood, the kind one felt before doing something they know is wrong. Time seemed to slow down enough that even my furious beating heart seemed to calm down somewhat in comparison, and my arms floated as if stuck in molasses.

"Takasaki-san," I began.

"The truth is, when you first met me in the park, I didn't want to live anymore. Abuse and endless, useless studying and put-downs constituted all of my life back then, and I know it sounds terrible to say, but maybe you can sympathize if I say life doesn't seem very worth living from that point of view if it's all just negatives. I was really prepared to…well, um. If not there, then somewhere else. But then you came out of nowhere, like…well, um, I know it sounds really cliched…but like an angel."

Takasaki blushed at the compliment, and it gave me the hope to keep going.

"I don't know what secret made you so sad back then, and I still don't know, and maybe you won't ever tell me. But every day I still see you smile and laugh and do your very best day in and day out to make every person you talk to just as happy as you appear. You could have cried and given up like me, but you decided to take a different approach. You showed me that life could be something, that there was another option available to me.

So I took that option. I gained the courage to stand up to my mom, and I imagined you, clapping for me as I did so. I didn't care how many times she said it was important for the future or success or making money or whatever. But when I stayed up bleary-eyed and half-dead until 6am poring over formulas or after 72 straight hours to finish a physics proof or to study for a test or to compete with the Americans and Chinese to the final rounds at the international olympiad in Azerbaijan, I did it because I remembered how you said it was 'cool' and I pictured you cheering me on to finish the job or win the competition. Sometimes in a cute cheerleader outfit waving pom-poms, I have to admit."

I had started to worry whether I might have sounded like I was bragging too much, but that last visual caused the two of us to laugh, and it warmed me inside that I had managed to make her do so.

"You know, my mom almost forced me to go to a better science-oriented high school, and I really didn't want to listen to - "

"Shuu's school?" Takasaki queried. "I always wondered why you didn't go there, it seemed so obvious for a genius like you."

I smiled. "I heard you were going to Kasugayama, so I applied there instead."

Takasaki said nothing in stunned silence.

"Maybe it's a dumb reason, but all I needed was a reason. Do you remember what you told me back then? I still remember the exact words: 'Maybe one day you'll get lucky too, and you will. Maybe you'll be better than me and have enough courage to tell whoever it is.'"

Takasaki's expression changed to one of confusion as she recalled the words, their meaning, and her guess for what I was about to say. I grabbed one of her soft, plush hands and wrapped it in mine. I leaned forward and gave all my attention to her wide-open eyes, my legs and arms shaking as if bare outside in winter snow.

"That day came, I got lucky, I know who it is, and now I worked up the courage to tell her."

My heart raced as I raced towards the punchline, scanning her for any hints of a reaction.

"You saved my life. You've given me the motivation to go on and you light up my darkest days when nothing else would. I owe you so much already, I don't know how I can ask this. But nevertheless, I know how it feels now, I know what you were talking about now. I fell in love with _you_, Takasaki-san."

She took a moment as her face flushed roseate, not that I expected her to respond right away. The temptation to look down did occur to her eyes, but she forced them back to me.

"Reader-kun, it touches my heart that I brought you so much happiness and that I mean so much to you, it really does."

She withdrew her hand from mine.

"I wish I could tell you something else, but I don't have a choice. I hate people feeling sad, I hate making them sad myself even more. But I only have one heart to give, and there's nothing I can do about it. I wish it weren't like this."

My entire body slumped, as if something flexed and splintered inside, and my hands felt cold. My heart nearly stopped, as if I had just gotten back an F on a test and hoped it was a mistake. As crestfallen as I was, though, it was all my fault. She literally told me she loved someone else the first time we had met, after all.

"Is it the eraser boy?" I asked.

"Yes," she confirmed. "We confessed to each other already. We even…we even kissed." The last admission caused her to blush and cover her lips with her fingers, and it further ground to sand the already shattered shards of my heart.

I gave a weak nod and a weak half-grin, my image of Takasaki blurring away as my eyes watered. "I'm happy for you that it finally happened, in a way."

She gripped my shoulder and squeezed it.

"You're an amazing guy, Reader-kun. You're super smart and have a good heart. Whoever your assigned wife turns out to be will be lucky to have you and will love you a lot, I'm sure of it."

"Thanks," I responded, looking away and trying to hide the tears welling in my eyes.

The door unlatched at the worst possible time. My father swaggered inside in his tech engineer jeans and blue t-shirt getup that turned back his age by a decade, and Takasaki stepped aside.

"Hey, Reader, happy sixteenth birthday my kid!" My dad called out, arcing in and pulling me into a firm hug that I really needed in this moment. I wrapped my arms around his back and squeezed him in return, wiping the moisture from my eyes in his shirt and leaving wet stains.

"Happy birthday," Takasaki added in a timid whisper.

"Oh yeah," my dad remembered, backing away and pulling something out of his back pocket. "Usually it's the counselors who handle this sort of stuff, not engineers, but the ministry let me do a one-off since I'm your father. Technically it's all from our algorithms and I'm not supposed to comment, but I think you're going to really like this one."

He smoothed out the nondescript manila envelope against his chest, then presented it to me with both hands and a bow. I took it, and inspected its outside. I knew what it was, and I needed it now more than I ever thought I did. I shared a glance with Takasaki, took a deep breath, and decided I'm more than ready to finally move on.

"Hope you like your present," he prefaced, as I prepared to tear open my government arranged marriage notice.

Then my father sized up Takasaki from head to toe one more time and snapped his fingers.

"Ah, you're Misaki Takasaki, right?".

"Oh, Mr. Reader," she replied with a surprised, automatic bow. "How do you know?".

"Reader mentions you a lot at home," he stated, and I almost crumpled my marriage notice in embarrassment as my cheeks flushed. It really was time to end this and move on to my new assigned partner.

"Here you go," my father handed Takasaki another manila envelope.

Wait. No.

That only meant two possibilities, and I knew my father, despite working for the Ministry, did not usually handle notifications. Which meant only one possibility, really.

I tore off the top of my envelope in one swift motion and dumped out the papers into my hand. Several disclosures and disclaimers and brochures with relationship advice drifted to the floor, but I gripped the important one so hard I nearly pulled it apart.

Staring back at me, from the picture and name printed on the government assignment notice and in person two feet in front of me, was Misaki Takasaki. I fixated on her, jaws agape.

She didn't even bother to open her notice, my expression told her all. Her sad eyes mustered the best politician's smile she could, and it mouthed a congratulations so tiny I couldn't hear it.

My dad beamed in ignorant pride and Silicon Valley optimism with a thumbs up.

I covered my eyes and ran away past my friends to lock myself in my room.

* * *

Author's Note: In the face of market inefficiencies resulting from externalities, Coase's theorem states that market participants can overcome them through negotiation provided transaction costs are low. Nowhere are transaction costs higher than two manga characters trying to confess how they feel to each other. They say every people gets the government it deserves, so it was only a matter of time before we got a manga (and anime) where its characters' marriages are assigned via government intervention.

And a happy new year.

See disclaimer in chapter 1.


	5. Love is a Simple Lie Group

A thousand dotted lights stared back at me and Takasaki like a theater audience of red eyes from the tops of the cluttered Tokyo skyline across the bay. Lines of fluorescent windows striped across in dozens of layers up and across each building like the illuminated golden lettering of massive upright books, while skeletal cranes of steel clawed for more from the tops of the financial district into the peach and plum streaked sky above. The Rainbow Bridge lit up its eponymous spectrum across the heights of its suspension towers, casting a mirror into the dark, swishing ocean below its span. Sparks of carlight danced and scurried across it like fireflies in the thick, sticky summer humidity settling upon my neck.

I turned my head and looked at Takasaki, the latter munching in thought on a skewer of chestnut dango I had bought for her at a stand by the waterfront. She tried to separate the sticky dumpling with her straight, pearly teeth, baring them somewhat to avoid smearing the dabs of chestnut cream on top onto her bright lipstick. She wore a navy blue tweed jacket buttoned only at the top, and a matching knee-length pencil skirt and low heels. It was one hue darker than the dress she wore five years ago when we had first met, although I dismissed the possibility that she could have thought of that. A silver chain draped across her chest to terminate at a tiny bright blue leather bag adorned with the crosslinked silver C's of Chanel - borrowed from her mother's only one, she demurred. I couldn't help but notice the beauty with which the blues complemented her brilliant eyes against the backdrop of the twilit water.

I almost reproached the relative ease of my own button shirt and dark slacks I threw on this morning.

"Oh, it's so pretty!" she interjected, pointing at the chromatics of the Rainbow Bridge. A pink leather Fitbit bracelet jangled against her lithe wrist. "It's funny how every time I've seen it up until now, the lights always had some other color scheme. This is my first time actually seeing it in rainbow at night."

I already beamed like an idiot, but I couldn't help but stretch the edge of my straining mouth even further at her excitement.

"Yeah, it is," I agreed. "It's interesting how Tokyo isn't really that far, but we never seem to make the trip more often, isn't it."

"Well, we're students, we're busy and I guess we never really have a particular reason to day to day," she explained.

"Well, we did today," I responded. She turned her head to me.

"Yeah, I think it was a good idea coming out here today," she replied with a soft smile. "That kaiseki place you recommended was kind of stuffy but the food was the best I ever had."

I didn't know what overcame me with intemperate greed in that moment. I felt my chest thumping inside and then almost trying to escape my throat as I resolved to risk it all.

My fingertips twitched, inching back and forth towards Takasaki. I made up my mind and seized her hand, wrapping her cool, slender fingers within mine. They felt so soft, and it felt at once terrifying and yet intimate to tether myself to her like this. I ran my thumb over the plush smoothness of her skin, the bumpy firmness of her knuckles, the cool stiffness of her unpainted fingernails. The sweat emanating from my warm palm and threatening to slide it away. I knew I didn't earn this, and I didn't know how she would react, but a tiny, pernicious slice of my mind I would rather not acknowledge felt entitled to this nonetheless.

She didn't pull it away, but she did look away with an expressionless line between her lips and said nothing. Her hand decided to go limp in mine as she gave it over to my direction.

"Sorry we had to meet up so late even on a Saturday," I tried to divert the topic. "Just, math competition today, and then I have homework and projects tomorrow, so kind of hard -"

"I understand, Reader-kun," Takasaki excused me. "What you're doing is all for a good cause. Besides, I like going out and seeing all the lights of the city at night - I mean, I wouldn't do it on my own, I guess, but as long as I have someone protecting me - er, accompanying me."

She tried to correct it, but the slip up excited me even more.

_"__I'm _protecting_ Takasaki-san,"_ the gremlin in my head shuddered in excitement, and I squeezed my hand around hers even more. I'd never held a girl's hand before, and it pumped so much electricity into my arm and heart that I was afraid I would lose control and let go.

Takasaki and I - the couple, my mind fancied - promenaded down the waterfront until I spotted a few big rocks leading down to a tiny, stony beach. There was a takoyaki stand nearby, and though I regretted to let go of my princess for even a second, I spent a twenty-second detour to pick a few up for the two of us. The octopus balls were so scalding that even through the faux-wooden cardboard boat I jolted.

Takasaki wiped the surface of one of the rocks, before I intercepted with a spread-out paper napkin for her to sit on. I joined her, and together we stared at the tide washing in and out over the smoothed stones on the tiny remnant of an urban shoreline. The rhythmic swish of the water, as dark and troubled and sea-blue as Takasaki's eyes, measured the time away in seconds. By now the moon had come out and joined the bridge and city lights in casting their reflections on the undulating surface.

"When I look at these sorts of rocky beaches, I can't help but think of the beaches at Nice," I recalled from my childhood. For all the grief my mother gave me, my father's largesse had familiarized me with the basics of Europe in person.

"You've been to Nice?" Takasaki inquired, and I nodded.

"That's so cool! I've never been to Europe, although my parents promise we'll go when I graduate, especially if I get into a good college. _If…if…if._"

"Nice was my favorite, actually. There just isn't anything else like it in the world. Although, it was kind of hot in the sunny sort of way when I was there, and the beach is just full of sharp rocks and it's impossible to walk on, much less play on." The latter prompted Takasaki to laugh, and I joined her.

"I've always dreamt of Sorrento myself, for some reason. Waking up in a princess bed, throwing open french doors onto a balcony, and seeing the black volcanos shrouded in mist across the water."

A beat. "You know," she added, "I always heard that love is so strong in Europe, especially France and Italy. We've never been able to see that in Japan with the Yukari system, but I wanted to get a chance to see what it used to be like…But Italy just passed their own Yukari Law in a referendum a few days ago. Italy! They're the ninth E.U. member to do so…I never thought it would have spread outside Japan, especially in the West…how could…" Her voice trailed off as she stared out into the water, shaking her head.

"That's why you want to go into politics, isn't it?" I cut through her mumbling. I had debated whether to divert the conversation or…well, I had made my decision.

Takasaki exhaled, bringing up her knees and tucking them in against her body.

"Not the only one, but yes, the main one," she admitted, and a tiny shard of the hidden Takasaki cracked and fell away. She gritted her teeth and balled up a fist and hooked at the moon. "I want to destroy the Yukari marriage notices, _carthago delenda est _and all that. Love comes out of the heart and the ether, not some state-sponsored computational slurry of linear algebra and vector calculus!"

"It's not impossible they could happen to come out to the same answer?".

Takasaki crooked her head in confusion.

"Well…"

_"__I love you, Takasaki-san, but you were assigned to me anyway,"_ I wanted to finish. I had already told her anyway, last week, when I had confessed my feelings and gotten our notices. She had only betrayed her disappointed smile and wan eyes right then. Since then, she had donned a cheery facade. When my parents (really, my father) arranged for me to take her on a date, she complied with all her typical ebullience. When I picked her up at her home, she waved her parents goodbye with all the outward enthusiasm of a girlfriend.

_Girlfriend._

I stared up into the empty night sky, the city lights crowding out all the stars that might have otherwise streaked and painted the universal canvas. I was out on a date in the city with the girl of my dreams, now also my assigned wife thanks to the magnanimity of the Yukari system. Eating together, walking and talking together, holding hands together. I had loved her and my shyness could only dream of her for the past five years, and now it had finally come true.

So why did I feel as empty and airy as the sky above me?

Even a dream come true is still a dream.

I stuck a toothpick into one of the mayonnaise- and worcester-drenched fried monsters and blow on it. I offered it to her, a hand cupped underneath to foreclose the possibility of a spill on her rather dapper outfit, and she accepted it albeit with some difficulty stuffing the whole food item into her small mouth.

"I wonder if all of the shoreline looked like this before they built anything here," I wondered out loud, looking down at the pebble beach again.

"Probably," Takasaki affirmed. "I wonder if people were happier back then. Less of being told what to do, and all that."

"I mean, we still had feudal lords back then. Marriages were still arranged, too."

"I guess. Why couldn't we do better thousands of years later?".

I popped the other octopus ball into my mouth, then put my hand over Takasaki's, prompting her to look at me. I took a moment to gulp it down before continuing.

"We can do better," I declared without even knowing what I meant in the specifics. "I have a feeling that we'd make a great team for what you want to do. I'll help you the best that I can, I promise."

"That's…" Takasaki trailed off. What did she mean to add? I wasn't sure even she knows.

I leaned in towards her. I moved my hand to brush away a loose strand of hair and rested against her cheek, causing her to jump in surprise. It felt so smooth, her face so pale and flawless

"Listen, Takasaki, I know there's many things that make you sad, even though you try so hard to look happy to make others happy. You have secrets you won't tell me, and troubles that I can't fix. But you're angry at the world and the way it is, and you feel that addressing these larger problems might indirectly assuage your smaller, personal ones for which you have no answer.

Well let me tell you something: I am too. Maybe not as much as you, but I know where you're coming from. I just want to see you happier, to see you smile - really smile, not just labor at one day in and day out - and I'm not sure how to do that, but I want to try my best. Because I feel the same way."

Takasaki closed her eyes and bowed her head, exhaling.

I took the cue, closed my eyes as well, and leaned into the last few centimeters between our lips to -

Takasaki put a finger to my mouth and pushed me back. Cursing at myself for misreading the situation, I opened my eyes and my sight overrode my previous concerns. Her watery irises sparkled like sapphires beneath the moonlight, as if set within the glaring velvet jewelry boxes at the Fifth Avenue Tiffany's. Iridescent diamond tears pooled at the bottom before drip, dripping down her fine china cheeks. Even through my guilt, even though she was hurting, I couldn't help but admire her incredible sublime beauty in this moment. A perverse thought, but maybe even more than usual?

She buried her head into my chest and grabbed my arms, crying.

"You deserve better, Reader-kun," she muffled out. "You're so nice and smart, Reader, I'm so sorry! I'm so sorry, you don't deserve this."

I ran my hand through the back of her downy shoulder-length hair. So fluffy, it parted into strands between my fingers. Lavender wafted from the traces of shampoo and I breathed it in; I was almost tempted to ask her which one she used.

"You're right, I don't deserve this," I muttered in literal agreement but figurative disagreement. "I got assigned to the most beautiful, kindest girl I ever met. What did I do to deserve this indeed?".

Her warm tears soaked into my shirt, but I didn't mind. Besides her crying in the first place, of course. Her forehead felt firm against me, and even given the circumstances, even given the words between us now, I enjoyed touching her, having her so close.

"You deserve someone who loves you, Reader-kun."

"So do you," I declared, "and that's what you got."

She bawled and hugged me harder.

"I don't love you! I can't love you, because I already love someone else! I'm so sorry!".

My heart cracked like an overbaked ceramic, and I kept thinking to myself that it didn't make any physiological sense for it to physically hurt like it did now. I was sad too, and she blurred in my eyes with their own tragic moisture, but I continued to stroke her hair and maintained the best even tone I could.

"I know."

"You know about the mathematician Evariste Galois?" I began to recount. A pointless rhetorical question, of course she didn't. "Brilliant Frenchman. Invented an entire new branch of math called group theory when he was just a teenager and centuries ahead of his time. Died at the tender age of twenty, penned all his great mathematical insights into letters the night before he got shot in a duel over a lover. Do you think he was a genius or an idiot?".

Takasaki, too occupied in her weeping, didn't answer, so I provided my own.

"I think he was an idiot. Such a genius, and yet did all that and died over some girl who didn't love him back."

"Just like me," I added in a whisper.

Takasaki got up, rubbing her eyes, and their redness pulled at my heart. Even if it wasn't my direct fault, even if there were nothing I could really do about it, I still felt responsible.

"I can lie. I can go out with you, maybe I can even hold your hand. I can lie to others. But how can I lie to myself? All I'm good at is lying, is keeping secrets hidden from other people, but in the end there are some lies too big for me to tell after all."

"Even if it's a lie, I don't care, I love you anyway," I told her, and she shook her head.

"You idiot," she choked out between tears, "you really do love me, don't you? Why can't you…you wouldn't…you wouldn't be willing to get the marriage notice annulled, would you?".

I looked away towards the skyline, towards the gleaming glass spires looming over the financial district across the bay. Outsize logos of Barclays and HSBC and Goldman Sachs shined back at me.

"Even if I hated you, even if it cost me nothing emotionally, it would cause legal problems and harm our future careers - mine most likely, yours definitely," I tried to disclaim through other means. "It can't be an option."

Takasaki buried her face into her hands, catching a few tears. "Why are you like this, Reader-kun? Why are you so blind? Why can't you just hate me?".

The answer gleamed as simple and unchanging as the derivative of the exponential.

"Because I love you, Takasaki-san."

* * *

Author's Note: See chapter 1 for disclaimer.


	6. Love is the Gale-Shapley Algorithm

I stared out the window, streaking a line through the dust with my index finger. Outside birds chirped their secret language and rustled the boughs of trees, while passersby mouthed chatter on the sun-beaten pavement. A squirrel darted out from the flower bushes and kicked up clods of dirt onto the empty schoolyard. Another chased after it, as if hoping to catch the former's bushy tail, although I had no clue what it would do with it. I wondered if it would succeed as I traced their spiraling movements for lack of better diversion.

Well, not for lack of a better diversion. Class lunchtime hummed around me, as my classmates mumbled unintelligible thoughts into each other's ears and laughed at unintelligible notes of humor. I sat with the window view, as I hoped to do in my later executive life, and I sat in the front, as if to accentuate the theme.

Propinquity to the instructor always intimidated ordinary students, and they clustered in their social groups towards the back away from me. It suited my purposes well enough. On an ordinary day, I would have joined Sasahara and Koharu and Michiru in their tittering circle in the back. When I didn't, they understood the signal well enough. Truth be told, no ordinary day had passed since I had confessed my feelings to Takasaki. Since the government arranged the girl of my dreams as my future wife. Since my dream came true.

And turned into a nightmare.

If I hadn't confessed to her right before getting the government notice, would that have attenuated the awkwardness? If I had simply played it off as chance — not as chance, as the methodical, purposeful design of the Yukari algorithms?

I recalled the sight of her lustrous gemstone eyes tearing up that night, and I scolded myself. She looked so beautiful while crying, as terrible as it sounded. Not to discount the unreal pulchritude of her smile. Her famous smile, the Misaki Takasaki the world knew: the ever cheery popular girl who befriended everyone. The angel who could shine away a rainy day with just the right curve of her magazine-covergirl mouth, who had a sunshine aphorism or a motivational speaker's note of encouragement for every dour occasion, who could look into one's eyes for the first time with all the instant understanding and tugging string of connection of a years-long friend.

The real Misaki Takasaki wept in lonely tragedy, holding together the shards of her exposed, torn heart in desperation and whatever secrets threatened to spill out from within. Like a shattered diamond, any of her facets would have looked beautiful. And yet the authenticity of her true self, peaking out from beneath the cracks of the porcelain mask she had constructed for herself, lent a certain additional quality above the others.

_"__Takasaki-san, what makes you so sad?"_ I thought to myself, careful not to mutter it aloud.

I wished I could kneel beside her, hold her chin, and extract whatever words balanced forever unspoken on her lips by pressing my own. I thumbed over my dry lips as the latter twitched at the thought.

I rolled a rice ball across my lunch box with a chopstick, although its stickiness prevented it from getting far. Lunch had already half-expired and I still hadn't touched a single grain. A snack for afternoon English class, I supposed. Another bad habit developed in the aftermath of the government notice.

I wanted the old Takasaki back. The distant, optimistic angel, the unreachable if gorgeous scenery of my life. Even as I conversed with her, even as I went on dates with her, even as I held her hand in mine, she never seemed more far away than now. I never wanted to see Takasaki cry. I wanted to return that idyllic ambiguity, that dreamlike if unrealized possibility, without an explicit "no". To have confined my relationship with Takasaki to the perfection of theory rather than the hollow reality dragged and willed into existence by the Yukari system.

"Hey," a hesitant voice greeted, extending a hand in front of my face. I bolted up, chair screeching behind me, and shook it in return. He had an unkempt mop of brown hair, a few careless strands sticking out from the back, and his neck had a slight forward hunch. His face was a tad too long and I was not sure I had ever seen such wide-open, clueless eyes on a guy before.

Thoroughly average.

"Yukari Nejima," he introduced himself. The name didn't ring a bell. And what a strange moniker: named after the Yukari system? Weird parents.

"Firstname Read - " I started, but he cut me off.

"Oh, I already heard of you, plus Takasaki-san mentioned you were really good at math. I see your names at the top of all those exam and competition lists."

"Oh, yeah," I exclaimed as I recalled where I had heard his name before: in that exchange between Ririna and Takasaki at the chess tournament. "It sounds like you're acquainted with her, no? Are you in her class?".

"Yeah…" Nejima's eyes darted away briefly, but he covered it up with a grin and a nervous chuckle. I chalked the momentary lapse up to his apparent awkwardness and perhaps, as my modesty didn't want to admit, the intimidation of my reputation. "I'm in her class."

He handed me a sheet of paper with a bunch of equations on it.

"I'm…um, I'm stuck on number 3…do you think you could…lend me some help…please?" he stuttered out, shaking.

I glanced at the problem.

_"__True or False and Why?: For n2, the Gale-Shapley algorithm can take n^2 iterations or longer to stably assign between n men and n women." _

I set his homework down and glared back up at him. "You said you share class with Takasaki-san. She's in calculus right now, why are you giving me a pre-calc problem?".

"Oh…" Nejima rubbed the back of his neck. "She takes math separately from the rest of the class because she's ahead of us. You do something similar, right?".

"Yeah, I take my maths with the local university on Fridays," I replied, before it hit me. Everyone kind of looked the same beneath me, at least in academics, and I had long derailed off the typical grade school curriculum track. So when Takasaki came to me for calculus help I had just assumed that freshmen took that level normally. I realized I never thought of Takasaki in that way before. Oh, sure, I always admired her and thought her wonderful and talented, but not like that. Why not? Because she was a girl? Because she was beautiful and nice and that was good enough for me not to bother to find out what else?

_"__Maybe the Yukari system did have some reason to match us up after all,"_ I pondered. _"Why aren't you curious enough to find out yourself?"_

I looked down at my clenched fists, and wondered how I could have condescended her when I had put her on a pedestal.

_"__How much else do the computers think we share? What else are they?"._

"She really is amazing, isn't she?" I blurted out half-awake, before wincing when I realized I had said that out loud, then hiding that reaction on further thought.

"Yeah…" Nejima trailed off, looking off into the suburbia beyond the windows. He looked as if about to say something more, but he bit his lip.

"She's so popular, yet sometimes she feels like such an enigma. You sound like you know more, you know, as her classmate," I commented, hoping to drip-feed further crumbs from this Nejima guy.

"Anyway, back to the problem," he drove through the best he could with his tentative voice, pointing a finger at it. "I don't understand. I think it's true because the algorithm is big O(n^2), but that doesn't feel long enough to be a proof. I can't even begin to think about doing it by hand."

Normally I wouldn't help, but his snub of my query flustered me so much I latched onto the opportunity to move the conversation.

"Oh, actually, first thing is big O(n^2) is definitely not the same thing as running for exactly n^2 steps. Second, it might help to just do it nonconstructively," I answered. "First, you know the algorithm has to end eventually and produce a pairing, right? Just citing the proof from class?".

Nejima nodded. "Uhhh…I think I remember that much. It wouldn't make sense if it never ended, right?".

"So if you remember the algorithm, each of the men - could be the women instead, but let's say men - proposes to a woman each iteration, and the algorithm continues so long as someone gets rejected. When everybody is set, we finish and pair them off."

I flipped over my English worksheet and scrawled a grid on the back.

"To force n^2 iterations, we need at least n^2 - 1 rejections, one per day. Now, the worst case scenario is where all n men have to ask all n women. What's the maximum number of rejections the algorithm can sustain?".

Nejima laughed, his loose red tie swaying under his unbuttoned collar. "I guess it's n^2? If every man proposes to every woman? So true?".

"Not exactly," I interrupted. "We know Gale-Shapley must finish by its definition - if a girl has nobody until the last day, or they're stuck with a guy they don't like, the algorithm will force them to accept him by the end."

"That's a bit harsh," Nejima commented.

"You say that while we live under the Yukari system, you softie," I poked back. "Anyway, back to the problem, so each of the n women can only reject up to n - 1 men, for n^2 - n rejections, which is greater than n^2 - 1 for n bigger than 2. Because we don't have enough rejections, we can't make the algorithm last until the (n^2)th day, so the answer is false."

Nejima nodded. "I see…that actually makes a lot more sense! It never even occurred to me to try to think of the problem that generally! I was stuck trying to make up some example group of boys and girls with preferences."

"No problem."

"Actually, do they use this 'Gale-Shapley' in the Yukari system? The ministry, I mean?" Nejima asked. "Just curious."

"Hm, probably. There's also the Kuhn-Munkres algorithm, but I find it unlikely they use that one."

"Why?".

I sketched out a group of four stick figures and a bunch of lines and numbers between them. "Gale-Shapley maximizes stability. It's supposed to prevent rogue couples with mutual incentives to cheat. Alternatively, Kuhn-Munkres maximizes overall utility. It just seems more likely the Yukari systems uses Gale-Shapley, given it's mandate."

I added, "One side effect you can prove, in a male-proposer Gale-Shapley, is that men would get their optimal partner out of all possible in stable pairings, and women get stuck with their least preferred while acceptable partner. And vice versa in the female-proposer version."

"Hmmm…" Nejima hummed, pressing a thumb to his chin. His eyes drooped a little, as did the ends of his mouth. "Yeah, that sounds right actually. From what I've seen, I actually…I mean, I feel like that's the truth, actually."

"Hey, sorry if this is kind of personal, but feels kind of related. Have you gotten your Yukari notice yet?" I questioned.

Nejima froze, then defrosted with his arms and smile at awkward angles. "Huh yeah…her name is Ririna Sanada. She goes to a different school."

"Oh yeah," I recalled from the abortive chess match. "She's actually kind of cute, but she's a bit awkward, but I guess that's sort of cute too as long as it's not abrasive. Lucky guy, you. Hope it's going fine."

"How about you?" Nejima shot back. "You're always the best…best in exams, best in competitions, more ahead of us in math and science than we've been in school. Except maybe in the looks department, that's Nisaka's spot - "

I glowered at him for a second.

" - but that doesn't matter for the Yukari system.…if such an average guy like me…I really wonder what sort of girl they would assign to someone like you."

"Oh yeah, she's - "

A lump caught in my throat, and I coughed to try to clear the imaginary obstruction, to no avail. My assigned wife on a piece of paper and in some government record system, sure. But did Misaki Takasaki bear any other relationship to me, as a girl, as a person? I hadn't even talked to her since that bad date when she repeatedly, emphatically declared that she could never love me.

I couldn't name her as my assigned wife.

She wasn't my anything.

I didn't have her, I didn't earn her, and I didn't deserve her.

"Oh, is it something personal?" Nejima backtracked. "Sorry for asking. I…I get how complicated it can feel. Trust me."

Plus, I had one nagging suspicion. Not for this average-looking, average intelligence, forgettable nice character. Even Nisaka, the handsome, well-reputed other boy Takasaki had mentioned off-hand at the chess tournament, made more sense. An archangel like Takasaki had the whole world on offer before her.

But my one dumb, random, out of the blue question wouldn't mean a thing to him if my hypothesis proved false. A harmless toss in the dark that I might as well try, I assured myself.

"Hey, Nejima, this is kind of random, so ignore it if it doesn't make any sense and just forget I ever asked," I prefaced, "but did you ever give an eraser to anyone back in elementary school?".

Nejima tensed up, his teeth clenching. He jerked up his wrist to check his imaginary watch, swiveled on a dime, and bolted for the door.

"Oh, lunch is almost over, I have to head back to my class now! I wouldn't want to make Ta - my class rep have to write me up!" he called out behind him.

It really, really, really could not be. Maybe I had misinterpreted the whole last few seconds, like the broken measuring instrument that had led to the accidental "faster than light" neutrinos a few years ago, because the other conclusion proved so implausible.

The most beautiful girl I had ever seen, out of all the possibilities, fell for this awkward oaf?

* * *

Author's Note: See disclaimer in chapter 1


	7. Love is independent of Zermelo-Frankel

My steps clambered against the metal stairs as I approached the door to the rooftop and tested the rusty knob. It groaned and scraped and gave.

"I'd like to ask all of you here today a question," a muffled, yet unmistakable mellifluous voice queried beyond it. It rang with a metal edge of assertion. "Can one person defeat a hundred? How about a thousand? A million?"

I creaked open the door, schoolbag bumping against it on the way, and slipped out. Back against the wall, I snuck a look over my shoulder onto and caught a glimpse of her. She stood atop a generator as her impromptu stage, appearing at least a foot taller than typical from my vantage point. A small pile of thick paper printouts rested at its bottom, sheafs rifling open in the breeze.

"What is it that holds a million people together? The love for partner and child that builds a family, the love for a friend that binds a community, the love for the fellow citizen that glues together a country. The love for forebear that ties us to tradition and the love for children that ties us to the future. When these ties are at our strongest and we are our best selves, there is nothing we cannot accomplish together. When we know what is in each other's hearts, when we struggle together and gain an understanding of what each and every one of us needs and desires, even a million people can act with the purpose and tenacity of one."

She rested an allegiant hand over her chest and tilted her head and wore a smile that a million people could fall in love with. More of a slight smirk, maybe even a sneer. It had a little bit of herself injected into it compared to her ordinary deferent expressions that, though with a firm radiance, reflected whatever the viewer wanted to see of themselves. The sort of glowing charisma and infectious optimism she seemed to impart to everyone but me.

"We are the luckiest generation to live on this Earth. At this moment of maximum challenge, equipped with the maximum potential of technology, in the face of some of the greatest, most perplexing social and political upheavals, it is the time for us to demonstrate who we really are and our ability to solve the problems facing humanity today and in the future."

Her sleeves rolled up, her red uniform ribbon doffed, the topmost button on her collar undone amid the sweltering humid air that insists on sticking and rubbing against my skin and soaking into my shirt, she somehow otherwise appeared unfazed. Her untiring voice retained the silken melody with which it had begun. All she lacked was a microphone or podium and an adoring, chanting audience. Their thousand imaginary gazes already reflected themselves in the twinkle of her eyes lost in their own enchantment, living not in the present.

"The great men in New York and London say fairness is impossible. The great men in Washington and Beijing say democracy is impossible. The great men in Tokyo and San Francisco say love is impossible. But to all of these great men I say, they do not grasp our inestimable imagination for the human dream! We cannot face the twenty-first century alone - left and right, man and woman, rich and poor. Only those who seek to divide us, who seek to abolish the love that binds us, benefit from this. One person can only defeat a million when the million allow it!"

She stretched out her arms, as if attempting to embrace the enormity of the aspirations, the geography, the humanity without limitations she had just invoked. The sun blasted behind her, bathing her face within a halo of blinding light and casting her long shadow. She surveyed the empty rooftop, nodding to applause only she could hear.

"_Trust_ ourselves. _Trust_ our inherent goodness. _Trust_ that when one of us chooses another one of us to share half our life, that free choice is infinitely more valuable and valid than any algorithm's. And that is why the first step to liberating humankind's unlimited altruistic genius must be the abolition of the Yukari Law - !"

I stepped out, and that's when she noticed me.

"Eep!" she shrieked. Her mask of confidence shattered, and she tripped and fell flat on her rear with a clang. For the briefest moment I pondered whether her blue plaid miniskirt was quite long enough to sit in.

"Are you okay?" I exclaimed, rushing over.

Takasaki rubbed her head as a furious blush took hold. She tried to calm herself down to no avail, and I couldn't help but think she looked so cute trying. "Ummm…did you…see any of that?".

"You might have a hard time becoming one of those 'great men' you mentioned if you get that flustered at someone seeing you speak," I teased.

"I wasn't expecting _you_ to show up!" she fired back. "And you missed the whole point of that bit - I'm not trying to be one of those great _men_."

"Why not?".

She shot me a knowing, judgmental side-eye, arms crossed, when she suddenly melted into concern. "Reader-kun! Are you alright?!".

"Wha?". And then she reached for my face, tapping the slight red web that trickled down above my ear with a cool, gentle fingertip. It still stung, besides the unexpected electric euphoria of Takasaki's touch. No one else had bothered to ask about it for the past few days, out of silent courtesy or silent ignorance or silent disregard.

"Oh, this?" I dismissed. "It's nothing."

"It's not nothing!" Takasaki protested, wrists and knees trembling together. And in that moment, she deigned to behave just like an ordinary Japanese schoolgirl once again. "Do you want me to get some bandages from the nurse's office? What happened? ".

Her worried face was so close to mine, and I kind of enjoyed the attention, even if not the reason for it. And the thought of lying in Takasaki's lap as she wrapped gauze on my head and tended to me…

I closed my eyes.

A few days ago, my breathing ragged, I found myself sprawled on the cold tile floor amidst a constellation of crystalline shards. Crimson rivers trickled down the side of my face and cracked glass pricked and embedded itself into my red-smeared fingers every time I touched it. I had tried to imagine Takasaki then, as I usually did in these circumstances, kneeling beside me to caress my cheek or mutter some encouragement. But my mind could only see the back of her swaying, glimmering hair as she declared her love to Nejima and wrapped her arms around his hunched neck and leapt to kiss him in delight.

"Go clean yourself up," my mother had spat as she tossed a paper towel at me. I had gotten into an argument with her over taking that Saturday night off with Takasaki instead of working on my science fair project, and it had ended with her knocking me off a chair by smashing a glass against my head.

I was more tempted to call the cops than I ever had been, but my phone remained in my pocket. I would have loved nothing more than to see her behind bars, but my mother had worked so many hard decades for her academic career. Maybe she had a point - what right did a loser like me have to topple that? I could already see the headlines: "Entitled teenaged loser calls the cops on award-winning, internationally renowned professor." I could already imagine how it would end. I knew it wasn't true, but it was reality nonetheless.

I sighed and opened my eyes, and saw the real Misaki Takasaki standing in front of me with concerned, pleading eyes. Pleading for me. Even though my heart sunk and chilled a bit and my shoulders slackened every time I saw her now, it still couldn't help but spark a little jolt of joy in my chest at the same time.

"Trust me, Reader-kun…you can tell me."

It wasn't an act. It wasn't her generic kindness. Something swam behind those storm-cloud eyes inside her brain, something she would never say but with which for some reason still felt familiar. The same thing I saw five years ago.

_"__I just fell on the way back from school,"_ I wanted to toss out. But the false lump lodged in my throat, and I almost gagged them out as I tried to lie to the one woman I loved.

I gurgled instead.

She put a finger to her lips and nodded to nothing. "It's okay. I understand."

Eager to change the topic, I stooped to pick up one of the packets lying on the ground.

_"__SUPREME COURT OF THE UNITED STATES_

_AMOROSO ET UX. v. NORTH CAROLINA_

_North Carolina's statutory 'Yukari' scheme to mandate marriage assignment by algorithm _held _5-4 not to violate the Equal Protection and Due Process Clauses of the Fourteenth Amendment. The judgement of the Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit is affirmed."_

Dropping the binder-clipped brick, I scooped up another stray paper, its pages blowing open.

_"__JPMorgan Global Research - An Investor's View on Yukari Laws & Privatization: Facebook, Google, and Tencent."_

"What is all this for, Takasaki-san?" I asked, waving the document in the air.

"Oh, I'm on the debate team."

"You're on the debate team?" I echoed, before I flushed red at not even knowing what club she participated in after class. Unexpected, although on second thought, not as much as I thought. What part of it felt unexpected, exactly? She possessed the affability for it, with certainty. But the flip side of that: the steely sharpness, the bickering jabs, the fiery animation, I had trouble associating with her soft-spoken congeniality. Even when I saw her first amongst her friends, her implicit leadership rested mainly on her unspoken beauty and reserved nods. I recalled she spoke the least within her gaggle of girl friends and yet still headlined over the discussions, much like a worn gaveling chairman.

She curled a strand of hair around her finger, looking away at the beige suburbia carpeting the distance. "Do you…do you think I did a good job?".

"Oh, on your speech?" I clarified to which she nodded. "I thought it was beautiful."

_"__Just like you," _I had the good sense not to add.

"Thanks." She swung her milky thin legs over the edge of the generator. "I feel like it's not very authentic, to be honest. It's just the typical fluffy stuff that people like to hear and eat up. We're definitely not the luckiest generation. The time to demonstrate who we were was forty years ago, our grandparents' time, when Japan first passed the Yukari Law. And we failed. And now this outrageous authoritarian, dystopian feature has embedded itself in banality - nobody cares anymore."

She sighed. "I mean, it's a very authentic issue to me, and I've thought about centering it around a personal anecdote instead, but my story's just not very interesting."

"What do you see in Yukari Nejima?" I blurted out.

Takasaki darted her head towards me and her eyes widened. "How do you know?" she squeaked. "Did he tell you?".

"No, no. He just happened to ask for some homework help recently and…I mean, I was kind of wondering, so…I just sort of asked," I explained. "Sorry if I shouldn't have."

She hopped down to the roof and patted the tile next to her. "I can already see it. Have a seat, Reader-kun."

I sidled up beside her, bunching up my knees. I withdrew an onigiri rice ball from a ziplock in my bag and unwrapped the seaweed. It got cold, and the rice became hard and fell apart, but it still appeared edible.

"Oh, late lunch?" Takasaki pointed. I nodded. "I haven't really been able to finish during lunchtime either lately," she admitted, pulling a small pink drawstring with a flower pattern from her schoolbag. "Want to share?".

"Sure." I responded by taking a second onigiri out of the plastic bag and handing it to her. "Not sure how good it still tastes."

"Not a problem at all, just wait til you see mine. Do you make them yourself?".

I shook my head. "I buy in bulk at the store, usually."

She reached into the pink sack, and pressed a hard, burnt, misshapen mound trying to pass as a chocolate chip cookie into my hand.

"Want a cookie?" she asked with a head tilt and a wink. "I keep trying to get into baking and cooking some things for myself and my step-brothers, but, well, hehe."

I took a bite as she watched, and almost winced at the texture of sawdust coating the inside of my mouth and the bland, smoky taste of combusted cardboard. I mustered a grin and thrust out a thumbs up.

"Verdict?" she asked, "And be honest."

"Well…" I trailed off. "It tastes awful, but it makes me happy to enjoy something you made."

She laughed. "Thanks for not sugarcoating it. I like the idea of actually making something, even if the outcome is terrible or I'm no good at it. It makes me feel like I'm productive and maybe worth something to the world."

She stared out into the distance. Beyond the suburbscape both of us could spy the distant shimmering ocean, the reclining sun skipping orange rays across it like pebbles. Just when I thought she had embarked on this awfully late lunch to divert away from my question, she began.

"I'm not surprised you guessed from talking with Neji-kun. It's hard to hide when you're in love, and it's even harder for him. When you lie or hide something, you can't just do it your words or even your voice. You have to do it with your whole body. And every little thing he does, from how he rubs down the cowlick on the back of his head when he's nervous to how he tries to pull up his neck when he's around me and then forgets to when he keeps glancing at me in class and trying to stop himself even though we're supposed to be reading. It just tells the whole world how he feels even when he really doesn't want to."

She nibbled at the onigiri I gave her and grinned off to nowhere, with nothing but Nejima in her dreamy eyes.

"You know, when he confessed to me, he started off by saying how average he is, how unremarkable he is, how he doesn't look that good or top the exam lists or do anything cool besides the kofun hobby he deprecates as nerdy and otaku-ish even though I think it's really cute. Most guys who confess sell themselves like I'm a college interviewer or a Google and Goldman Sachs recruiter or something. I don't usually think they're lying…but it's not really telling the truth either, is it? Just the very best part parts of themselves? I don't blame them, most guys who like me are the ambitious high-roller types who are used to the best, they just want to date 'the most beautiful girl in the school' as another line item to their already long resume of accomplishments."

I swallowed my saliva and wondered whether she meant to include me in that indictment.

"Even though I didn't agree with any of the descriptions he used for himself, I knew he didn't want to inflate his chances. He only wanted me to like him if I liked him as he really is. Which, of course, I do!" she chirped, throwing her hands in the air. The orange rays of sunset basked her calm, dreaming face, and for the briefest impossible moment there was nothing behind her relaxed blue eyes but lakeside serenity.

"I know he's nervous all the time and he probably thinks of himself as a coward, but I think he's actually very courageous," she continues. "It's easier for some people to puff themselves up with false bravado, but it's hard for someone in Neji-kun's position. Sometimes, when I have to think of what happy memories I have to show for life, what makes it worth continuing, I think back to when he gave me that eraser in elementary school. And even though you probably think it's small and insignificant, I knew he had to pluck up all the courage he had to do that one small act of caring for me at a time when nobody or nothing else would."

"I'm not someone's trophy," she stated, clutching her heart. "I want a guy who makes me as nervous around him as I do to him, someone who views me the way I view him. I want someone who makes my heart flutter as much as his. I want someone who I feel embarrassed stealing glances at in class even though I can't help myself. And that someone is Yukari Nejima-kun. Is that too much to ask for?".

Her face grew serious. "I know you probably think it's nothing, that 'oh, that's all?', that I'm so stupid for falling in love with someone over giving me an eraser in elementary school or some small thing like that. I know I'm a stupid girl, I don't need to be reminded. But those feelings are the most important thing to me, and I don't really care what you think of them," she concluded.

"I don't think they're small or nothing, and I definitely don't think you're stupid," I rebutted, turning and gripping her shoulder. "You should be easier on yourself. You're an amazing girl, Takasaki-san, don't let anyone tell you otherwise. Including yourself."

"Only a stupid girl would fall for someone so deeply in a country where a government AI decides your partner," she muttered. A thin line of moisture underlined her askance eyes, although she held them back.

"Then don't," I spat out, without even thinking.

"What?" Takasaki asked.

"Don't marry me. Break the Yukari Law, ignore your notice." My voice cracked, and I couldn't believe the words tumbling out of my mouth. "I'm tired of seeing you miserable about this all the time. I don't want to see you cry anymore. I just want you to have that look you had when you were talking about Nejima, but forever instead of just a second. I love you Takasaki-san, I really do, more than anyone! I would rather spend my life with you, but not at your cost. I want you to do what makes you happy and look forward to life."

"And then what?".

"Excuse me?".

She repeated, "And then what? Marry Nejima and destroy his future? You know he won't be able to get into history graduate programs to study his kofun mounds if he did that. How many times have I explained this to Ririna too?".

"Ririna?" I asked, before remembering her as the girl at the chess tournament and Nejima's assigned wife. "She had - "

" - the same, idiotic idea," Takasaki finished. "She just thinks of this as a love story and she wants to play the hero, when she's meant to play the heroine."

"Well what about you?" I asked, "Breaking the Yukari Law doesn't prevent you from running for election."

"Voters would never go for it," she denied.

I pointed out, "There's plenty of recent examples of successful candidates with legal problems and domestic problems and -"

"What?" she groaned. "Really? Really? I'm on the wrong side of the gender line, and the moral line, and…I don't even want to think about it. Do you really think I have it in me to be one of those men, and if I did, do you really think that's what I want to achieve, the kind of person I would want to be?"

She sighed.

"I would just be trading one form of happiness for another. My own, I would make that trade. But Neji-kun's, the one I love? What about yours and Ririna's?".

"It wouldn't be our fault," I asserted.

"And you think you wouldn't still be held responsible by the system?"

The realization hit me like an unexpected cold, glass wall. I finished up the last few stale grains of my onigiri in silence, the two of us staring off into the purpling sky.

"Trust me, don't just speak off the cuff, I've already thought about this problem many times," she said.

"What if," I began, "what if, you followed through on the notice with me and then just…with Nejima…on the side…I mean, I guess it wouldn't be the best, but…"

_SMACK._

I touched my stinging cheek, and realized Takasaki had just slapped me. At least with the care to pick the opposite side from my cut. She balled her hands into shaking fists. I didn't recognize the alien emotion etched into her red, fuming face, until I realized it's the first time I ever saw her angry.

"How could I? How could you say such a thing? Do I really look like the kind of person who could disregard and trample on your feelings like that?" she lambasted, her breathing heavy. "That's not only mean to yourself, but that suggestion is offensive to me too! Apologize!".

"I'm sorry, Takasaki-san, I was only trying to help and come up with something! I really didn't mean it that way, I should think more before I talk about these things," I blubbered out.

She huffed and crossed her arms. "Yeah, I know you didn't mean it in that way, but still."

An awkward silence. "You know, it's so weird, having this sort of conversation with you of all people," she noted.

I joined in, rubbing my neck. "Yeah, I guess it is."

"I'm really sorry," she apologized to me, taking my hand in hers, the last sliver of sun between us two and the fire-streaked purple sky above. They felt so soft, almost like a down blanket.

"It's okay," yI replied. "Do you know what you're going to do yet?".

She sighed. "I have to decide one way or another, and soon. I can't be like a dumb manga protagonist and just drag this and everyone's emotions along pointlessly for a hundred chapters or something."

"What do you mean, 'one way or another'?".

"I'm going on a date with Neji-kun next Saturday," she announced, beaming and her hands shaking with excitement, until she remembered me and tempered herself down. She started gathering her papers and stuffing them into her bag. "Oh, sorry."

"So that's when you'll decide?".

"Decide?" Takasaki asked. "I already decided. It's all in the implementation now, but I don't know if I can do it. I don't know anything except that I love Neji-kun. I just assume that and work out everything else from there."

She turned and started walking back to the door when I got up. My hands quivering, my voice quivering, I asked, "Takasaki-san - I don't know what the things you say mean going forward. I don't know what you're planning. But I have to know: if it weren't for Nejima, could you have loved me back?".

She paused mid-stride facing away from me, bag slung over her shoulder.

She slumped a bit from its weight,

I could wait for an answer for as long as she needed, even if that time means never.

"You can prove any statement true from assuming two inconsistent, contradictory statements," she began. "Any powerful axiomatic system must be either incomplete, having statements that cannot be proven, or inconsistent. I would rather choose incompleteness."

"Wait, that's Gödel's second incompleteness theorem," I exclaimed, reaching out to her. An advanced topic usually only covered in college math major courses. "How do you know - ?".

The rusty door slammed shut behind Takasaki as she left me behind with nothing but more mysteries and questions.

* * *

Author's Note: See disclaimer in chapter 1.


	8. Love is Misaki Takasaki

Content Warning: This chapter is especially dark, even by the standards of this fic. Warnings for abuse/bullying, implied rape, and suicide. Also manga spoilers.

* * *

Her life outside of meeting Yukari Nejima.

It was quite something.

"You have an adorable smile," the middle school teacher chirped as he leaned over her, fingers tapping against the blackboard. She had just finished off the integral of the hyperbolic tangent with a cursive flourish in her loopy girl's handwriting, beaming with accomplishment and dry chalk dust getting inside her nails. She had even remembered to tag the "+ C" constant at the end.

"You're really going to become something some day," her smiling mother declared, kneeling next to the crib of Takasaki's baby step-brother and stroking his hair. He fidgeted in a blue onesie, clutching a stuffed elephant almost as big as him. Her mother trained her focus entirely on him in faux ignorance, but Takasaki knew she could see her leaning against the doorframe, within earshot, wearing a polite smile.

That one time she scored the highest in the class on a test back in middle school, even somehow besting her genius friend Shuu, and she had a dumb grin for the rest of the day. Then none of her so-called girl friends would talk to her. Not even Shuu.

"Nerd," one of them had called her as she passed by in the hallway.

And she vowed never to do it again.

"You should smile more often," the stranger on the subway had advised her, leering at her and "accidentally" bumping into her voluminous chest amidst the unbreathable crowd.

She smiled back, naked, from pictures of her face edited onto grotesque stills from the most violent online pornography, stitched together with the computational power of an open-source generative adversarial neural network. A gaggle of the boys whose confessions or letters she had rejected - yes, that many - had teamed up to post these memes on their own dedicated website until her friend Shuu used her computer skills to hack it and take it down. She had urged her to take the list of IPs to the police. More innocent and bemused by the sheer lengths they had gone just to spite her than offended, however, Takasaki had nodded along back then. Knowing the history of Facemash and Facebook and Mark Zuckerberg, she figured one of the pranksters might become a billionaire some day.

One particular day, walking home from school and humming Saint-Saëns' _Rondo Capriccioso _to herself, she felt someone grab the crook of her arm and swing her to the ground. She missed her 50/50 chance and fell on the wrong side, feeling the abrasive concrete against her ribs on one side and the textbooks in her shoulder bag slamming into her other. Looking up, she saw one of the jilted guys, grinding his teeth and clenching his fists. He kicked her in the gut, saying her face was "too pretty to mess up", and she tasted something sour in the back of her throat as she nearly coughed out the contents of her lunch. She bolted her aching arms down to smooth down her short skirt, then clutched herself and shivered in pain on the sidewalk as the boy groused that he "would have raped her right then and there if her father weren't a politician," before stalking away. And all she could think was: _"good riddance I had said 'no' to him," _and whether he really would have had the guts to follow through on the threat.

When she came home she said she fell on the way. It was technically true and less of a hassle over what she considered a schoolyard tussle.

"You have your mother's smile," her weeping father told her during one of her final visitations to him. His thousand-dollar haircut and boyish charm had somehow survived impeccable, marred only by a five o'clock shadow, but his sinking, hungry eyes had aged a decade. He pinned her into the bed with his knee, all lights off and curtains drawn, his crooked golden Versace necktie dangling over her. He stroked her hair, and all she could wonder was how a man with such bad, whiskey-stained breath ever became a member of Japan's National Diet.

Misaki Takasaki had run out of illusions by then. She cried for weeks afterward, refused to go to school. When she finally returned, head against the desk and the former eager hand-raiser reduced to silence the entire day, a teacher pulled her aside and asked what was wrong.

She sighed and thought squeezing her eyes might suck the tears back in, but that only further reddened and irritated them. She could never forgive her father. And yet…her father had worked his whole lifetime to build attain the heights he did in his political career. Did she really have to tear it all down for an hour of indiscretion?

_"__A murder can be a single minute of indiscretion. Any crime can be, really. That's the whole point!" _the better part of her mind chastised herself.

She hated her father. She would never forgive him. But to see him live in jail for the rest of his life? And she could do without the inevitable Twitter death threats, the political howling and accusations of familial betrayal and doubts in every newspaper column, just the withering spotlight itself. Almost as if she were the one to commit a crime. She hated herself, how she had let society condition and disincentivize her so much that even her own mental jury chose to exonerate him. If she couldn't take her own side, then who would? But in the end, that's what she chose.

"When you're a politician, if you're having a bad day, that means you have to smile even more!" her father had once advised her in his warm normal voice, deeper than his years. He rested his hand around her small shoulder as they stood on the thick carpet in his cluttered office. Before the divorce, back when he was normal and wore his ties straight and shaved and the ordinary kind of family love existed between them.

Takasaki exhaled.

She wore the prettiest, most reassuring smile she could muster. It shined so bright it almost erased the sight of her puffy eyes and the trails on her cheeks. She shook her head, the teacher nodded, and she never stopped smiling since.

Some things couldn't be communicated in words.

It wasn't a single secret.

It was a thousand shards of experience pricking at her skin, summing up to an entire mental landscape of feelings and beliefs. It wasn't what she would first think of for the word "secret", but nonetheless an incommunicable kaleidoscope qualified in some sense, didn't it?

That time about a year ago when her friends blathered about first crushes and first kisses and Takasaki nodded along. She lied with her words, her benign smile, the very fact she conversed with them even as her heart looked back at her ruined past and ruined future and broke apart within her.

"Oh I'm not surprised you don't have one yet, you're so beautiful you can afford to be patient. I'm jealous!" one of them had rationalized.

That night Takasaki grabbed one of her mother's magnetic sushi knives from the kitchen with a zing as she peeled it off the rack, went up to her room, and locked the door. She laid her head against the desk, studying her reflection in the blade's polished surface. The face on whose beauty hundreds must have commented over the years. The face of a future beauty pageant winner, the face of a future music idol, the face of a future politician. The face she herself always saw in tears, in frustration, in anxiety when the world only saw her beautiful, beautiful smiles. The face she saw in the bathroom mirror every morning, the most ordinary thing in the world.

She plunged the knife down into her left wrist.

It didn't really feel like her own arm at all, as she see-sawed the instrument until it wiggled against rigid bone. It still hurt, in a distant, vague sort of way that she couldn't really bring herself to concern herself about. The pressure, the spikes in her chest every day in, day out, had already acclimated her anyway. Bright red globs gushed out and stained the porcelain-colored skin of her arm. They dripped down like a hundred red strings and soaked into the penciled equations beneath. She regarded the entire sight with her spent eyes and bored frown and thought about falling asleep. She had always imagined death would entail weeping and brokenhearted anguish, but in the end she had exhausted all capacity to care. She was nothing now, too little of a person left to grieve or cry over herself. She was just throwing out a defective product, nothing more.

The edges of her mind grew fuzzy and drifted back towards Nejima, like it always did. She glanced back at the steel and saw his tearful face pleading with her instead of her own reflection. His distant smile, his nestlike brown hair, the hunch of his neck. His childish eyes, broadcasting every thought and feeling on his mind. His bashfulness when he handed that eraser to her all those years ago. Seeing him grow up along with her from afar, seeing his adorable, endearing dorkiness expressed in a novel way every year.

"I'm sorry," she mouthed to herself, "that you couldn't even tell Neji-kun how you feel."

She loved him, more sure of that than anything else in her life. But how could she approach him and offer to him in good faith her defective life, her defiled body, her mangled soul? She only knew how to appear cheery and positive because she once had been. She had kept the obsolete shell, now rupturing from the toxic waste that had built up inside over the years. She knew would only make Nejima's life worse. She had lost all ability to inspire the best in other people, after she had lost track of her own definition of goodness. Her despair would only infect and taint Nejima. She had nothing he could want, if only he knew the truth. And that's what love was, wasn't it. Truth. What sort of mutated facsimile of love would spring forth from a foundation of lies?

But she wanted him anyway. Her heart burned for him, burned so much she thought it would burst and hurt more than the knife stuck in her arm right now. Even though he could never be her first in her black permanent ink-stained life, she wanted him more than anything else in the world right now. Even if it hurt her, even if it hurt him, even if it ruined everything, even if it was a lie. That was just the sort of person she was.

That wasn't love.

Why not just confess to him, then? Even amidst the abyss of her self-esteem, even she acknowledged her incontrovertible title as most beautiful girl in the school. By any objective standard not in her league, he had nonetheless won her over and the scenario gave her immense perverse pleasure.

She could win over anyone. But she didn't want anyone. She wanted Yukari Nejima.

"What if he likes someone else already?" her brain pondered. She also knew the Yukari system would never match someone like her with someone like him, in the end.

Takasaki sighed. It didn't matter anyway. Nejima didn't even know her, so he wouldn't even feel sad about this. But there was a reason hope was the last, cruelest item at the bottom of Pandora's box as she imagined his smiling and holding her hand. Even the unlikeliest future was distinct from impossible.

She dropped the knife, clattering on her desk in a sticky bloody puddle, and wrapped her arm in math homework. Her mother made no comment, they drove to the hospital, and her mother explained for her that she had cut herself in a cooking accident. Sometimes, when she wore a watch or a bracelet, she couldn't even see the scar.

Paralyzed between the tantalizing vision of Nejima falling into her embrace and the rest of her broken life, Takasaki waited for him to show up out of the blue and confess his feelings to her.

Which he did, a couple magical months ago.

And now on their first date, in the midst of kissing the one man she loved in the whole world, Misaki Takasaki still couldn't believe it. She pressed her chest against his, her heart hammering so fast within her she was sure he could feel it too. The muscle almost exhausted itself and she worried maybe it seized through a missing beat here or there and the possibility of falling into a cardiac arrest in the middle of her happiest moment. She didn't know there existed so much euphoria in the world, let alone that she could enjoy it. She had pretty much forgotten the definition of happiness before Nejima had confessed to her, and now she had several gallons of it in liquid concentrate poured into her brain all at once and she didn't know what to do with it or how to handle it.

Her whole body shook as Nejima's tongue brushed past hers with a deliberate wet lollipop lick and probed deeper into her mouth. The idea of a part of Nejima inside her excited her to no end and she wanted to get closer, to intersect in space further, only regretting that they were two separate people in two separate bodies. It wasn't enough to be with Nejima, to cling to his arms and press her face and lips against his, she wanted to _be_ Nejima: Misaki Nejima. To adorn her very identity with his name and leave behind the diseased part of her self with his better half.

Between her wild trembling and their passionate movements, a bit of their intermingled saliva sloshed out onto her lips. Her meticulous, ironed blazer wrinkled in his firm grip as he held her and she trusted him to lean on his arms like in a movie, forming a nice arc from her head to her billowing school uniform miniskirt fluttering in the park breeze. Individual strands dared to separate and poked out as her hair ruffled and glistened with sweat in the heat, summer and otherwise. The normal primness of Takasaki fell to the side as she consented to letting him see her like this. She didn't care how she looked, she just wanted more Nejima.

He rested a hand on her cheek, and she half-opened her dreamy eyes. She had always thought Nejima cute, maybe a degree of handsome in his own way, even as she sang her main praises for his good and honest heart. But now, as he held her, as he kissed her with passion Takasaki never imagined possible and as they swapped parts of themselves and fluids, it struck her in this moment just how sexy he looked in a way he never had before.

Her insides roiled and thoughts about Nejima not suited for polite contemplation entered her head. Takasaki shoved him away to catch a breath, although still close enough for a stringy bridge of saliva to connect their mouths. It took her a few seconds of panting to recover as Nejima shot her a quizzical, perhaps concerned, look.

"So…rry….any more…and, I… kind of, feel, like I'd lose it," she explained, wiping her mouth with her sleeve. "You're really, um, way too good at kissing, you know?".

As they sat back down, Takasaki pondered on how there existed no inherent logical reason that mashing two lips together should feel this fun. If anything, it should seem a little unsanitary and repulsive. But the way Nejima did it to her, the way doing it with him alone made her feel…

"Oh, um, thanks," Nejima acknowledged with a nervous laugh. "I'm just happy if you're happy about it."

"You shouldn't really take my word that much…I've never done it with anyone else, after all," she disclaimed. "I'm just guessing. Every time we kiss, my head just gets full of thoughts about you…it's embarrassing. I wonder if everyone else does that when they kiss their crush."

Nejima grabbed her hand and turned to look her straight in the eye, with that timorous determination she always found so endearing.

"You are my crush, but now you're my girlfriend!" he claimed her.

"Girlfriend…" Takasaki repeated, rolling the word over in her mouth. It tasted sweeter than anything coming from Nejima's lips, and yet. He had affixed a red string from her ecstatic present to the unceasing ticker tape of a stormy, impossible future. No longer a series of rhapsodic Dirac delta spikes, but a permanent Heaviside step function up - not that Takasaki would ever dare repeat such nerdy nonsense out loud, especially in front of Nejima.

"What?! Did I say something wrong, Takasaki-san?" Nejima asked in a panic.

"Oh, what, no? No, just a bit sudden, is all," Takasaki strung together incoherent particles into a semi-coherent expression of thought. "Girlfriend…girlfriend," she muttered, as she keeps trying to identify the source of the faint bitterness tinging the word, lost in thought all alone.

"Exactly!" Nejima exclaimed. "I know act a bit weird, and I have a stutter and a hunched neck and I wouldn't be a very reliable man, but I hope…I know, I'll try my best for you…Misaki!".

"Huh?". Her eyes widened and her concentration broke, as her first name caught her off-guard more than a kiss.

"Heh…I really just went all out, didn't I?" Nejima said, closing his eyes and rubbing his neck.

Takasaki thought back to earlier in their date, when they visited Nejima's favorite kofun museum. How he blathered on about the early pre-history of Japan in front of all those glass-encased artifacts, and the blank wonders of a civilization that left no recorded writing system, and even though she didn't really follow the individual words of his impromptu lectures, the passion etched onto his face remained indelible in her memory. She almost envied it, or coveted it for herself.

How Nejima worked himself up so much over some stamps and she found it adorable.

How Nejima thought her order of cream soda a bit childishly cute.

How she froze in fear when she saw Anekawa, the government section chief, at the museum for some reason and they had to hide in a photo booth and Nejima had to console her.

Wait, she wasn't supposed to remember that part. But she supposed the government might take a special interest in the Yukari arrangement of the daughter of a Japanese lawmaker. Potential opposition research. An aspiring politician herself.

"Your honesty, and that rare way you don't try to hide your failures, it's all part of what makes me love you," Takasaki considered. "You don't have to work to change a thing, Nejima-kun."

She looked up towards the sky. Almost scared to admit it, but she thought he deserved this much.

"A long time ago, I went through some pretty rough times. I didn't really want to go to school, or go back home. I'd just ask myself, 'why am I here?', and stuff."

Nejima grew a look of concern. "Nothing serious! Nothing like bullying or suicide or anything," she lied to assuage him.

"I thought I'd run away somewhere, didn't really know where, when I saw you, smiling like always. And I had these ethereal thoughts of 'oh, I really do love you.' And then they evaporated and I came back to reality and realized I had to do class rep duties again, like any other day."

She tittered. "Dumb, right? Just how much you like this guy? I usually think too much or think too deep and it's going to get me in trouble some day, I never thought I could think such a dumb, pure thing. But it's just you, Nejima-kun. You don't need to 'fix' yourself, because there's nothing to fix. I love you the way you are right now."

"Haha, thanks, I'm not really sure what else to say that," Nejima replied.

"Yeah, I was really happy to learn a lot of new things I love about you today."

A beat.

Takasaki got off the bench and stood in front of Nejima.

"I love you, Nejima-kun, more than anything, more than you could know," she declared, and she could see Nejima almost tearing up in joy. "And it's with that in mind that I want you to listen very carefully to me."

Her heart screamed at her not to do this. It banged at the door to her brain, screeching that this is the single worst idea it had ever conceived. Her selfishness could extract moments of happiness from Nejima, but she couldn't allow herself to commit to poisoning him with her true self. He would find out eventually. He didn't deserve this. To be honest, even Reader didn't deserve this.

Takasaki prepared herself to cut off her one and only reason for living, her fingers shaking over the metaphorical scissors. But on some level, she cared less than she felt she should, because she never wanted to live in the first place.

"I'm going to lie now, but this is a lie I have to make a reality." And she could see Nejima's expression melting into confusion. To be honest, she was confused too, but she pressed on. "I'm going to accept my government notice."

…

"WHAT?".

Her brain surveyed the state space of possible explanations with which to respond. The punishments for breaking the Yukari Law. Their affected futures. The growing chemistry between him and his assigned partner Ririna that everyone involved denied to themselves…

She could never allow Nejima to abandon her, even if the only way to accomplish that…

In the end, for all her so-called charisma she couldn't even convince herself.

"Look, even before the Yukari system, it was pretty unusual for high school sweethearts to get married, right?" she rationalized away. "It was thinking, we could keep doing this until graduation. You know, going out, spending time together, kissing…"

She didn't make any sense right now. She wasn't even being consistent. So much for implementation skills.

"Why?" Nejima whispered, a tear rolling down his cheek despite his best effort.

"You don't have to answer right now," she said. "You should talk to Ririna about it…in fact, you should focus on your relationship with her. A real relationship. I wouldn't mind…actually I would be happy. You need the normal sort of love, that the Yukari notices provide."

"Even you of all people are going to tell me that?" he muttered, shaking his head.

"I was really happy she was ok with all this…I was really happy to know how you feel and share these moments with you," Takasaki explained. "I'm just…I'm sorry I can't give anything back."

She spun and ran out of the park, weeping and screaming as the pieces of her heart, strung together by Nejima's red string, finally decoalesced again.

"Wait!" a breathless Nejima called out from behind her.

Panting. "I love you!" he declared. "You told me you loved me in that park all those months ago when I confessed to you! Was that all a lie too?".

Takasaki swivelsed almost offended. "Of course it wasn't a lie! I accepted, even though I knew I couldn't, because I was so excited and carried away in the moment. That's just the sort of no-good person I am. I'm just a stupid girl who knows what the right thing is and can't do it. I love you, Nejima-kun, I think I might even love you more than you love me, if you can even imagine it, even if I can't explain it in words very well."

"Then why?".

"Because my feelings, your feelings, both of our feelings, none of it is reason enough for us to be together."

Through her wet-blurry sight, she could see Nejima on the verge of tears again, in a way she had seen on a guy only once before. It saddened her how much hurt she had caused her beloved in this moment, and the moments to come, but she knew it was for the best for him.

"That doesn't make any sense! Why can't you tell me? You can trust me - " he hesitated for a moment, "…Takasaki-san, of all people! I'm the one you love! Who else could you tell? I don't want to see you sad like this! I just want nothing more than to spend time with you, hold your hand, make you happy!".

Takasaki cast her eyes down. "It's because you're the one I love, I can't tell you. I'd love nothing more than to do the same…but if you knew the truth, I doubt you'd ever want to hold my hand again."

"No matter what it is, I don't care!" he shouted.

Nejima fell into her arms, pressed his lips firmly on hers and his arm around her body and a hand around hers.

For a crystalline moment every reason to live, every good thing in the world permeated within her once again, until her accursed brain tamped it down and blocked off her overflowing heart and convinced her of what must be done. She pulled away, sultry eyes on her beloved, and shook her head. The curtains of her hair swished with it.

"I'm sorry, Nejima-kun," she intoned. "This is goodbye."

She turned and walked away and never looked back. It sounded like Nejima refused to budge for a while, and as she got further away she thought she heard Ririna's voice coming out and comforting him.

A fork in the road. On the right, her current house with her mother and step-family. She went left.

Nejima, in his typical historian's excitement, had discussed at the museum how the ancient kofun cultures didn't have a writing system to leave behind, and how all they left behind were artifacts that implied their ideas without words.

Words had too low of a bandwidth. Feelings had too high of a Kolmogorov complexity. And all the words in the Japanese language couldn't even constitute a complete linear spanning basis to represent the space of feelings she had wanted to express.

Some things couldn't be expressed in words.

Takasaki hopped on the next train to Tokyo, punched in her father's old address on Google Maps, and before she knew it she stood before the once familiar light grey apartment door. She knocked. No response, of course, even on a weekend.

She reached into her schoolbag for her wallet, extracting the almost-rusted key she hadn't used in years. She still wondered sometimes why she had kept it, maybe for this very moment.

It still worked, and she stumbled into the empty unit. She dashed for the closet and rummaged through its top shelf until her hand hit cool metal. With some difficulty she dragged out the heavy briefcase, protected by a numerical code. After punching in her birthday, it clicked open and she snorted in disbelief that he had never changed it.

One wasn't supposed to have guns in Japan, but people in high places played by different rules…

She knelt on the tatami mat in the hallway. No more knives or bleach or Tylenol. The 9mm handgun stared back at her, alongside half a dozen pointy, shiny pieces of brass. She fumbled a bit with the contraption, but she fashioned herself at least smart enough to figure this out. She pressed the side, slid out the magazine, and slotted in her first round with a click.

Her phone rang.

She sighed. Nejima or her mother?

_Firstname Reader_, the screen reported, displaying my cheery school photo.

With some reluctance, she tapped it and set it aside on speaker phone. "Hello?".

"Takasaki-san!" I greeted with more loudness than I intended. "Nejima and your mother have been wondering where you are and they're worried sick! They even asked me, and I had no clue. You weren't picking up their calls so I thought I'd try! What's going on!?" I said all at once.

Takasaki gave a weak smile, although she knew I couldn't see it. "I'm sorry for the inconvenience. I did kind of want Neji-kun to be the last person I talked to…"

She slotted another round in. Click.

Click.

"Wait, _last_…" I wondered aloud.

Click.

"Takasaki-san," my voice shook in trepidation and unwanted suspicion, "what are you doing?".

Click.

"It's okay," she dismissed, "nothing important."

"It's _not _okay," I pushed back.

Click.

"Are you trying to kill yourself?" I chased direct to the blunt point.

"Uh." The query caught her off guard. "Why do you ask?". Such a dumb question, and she knew it, but her addled mind couldn't come up with anything better.

"Why else would you do something so self-destructive as break up with Nejima like that?" I answered with my own question.

Her voice settled into that flatness she only used to recite a math theorem. "I explained it last time I talked with you. It's just not realistic. We both have futures that aren't possible if we - "

"You don't if you do this!" I accused, and she fell silent. "Don't play games with me, Takasaki-san! I've been there before, and I should have seen it in you long before!".

Takasaki gulped. She slammed the magazine into the pistol, and then slid off the safety.

"I have no idea what you're talking about," she claimed.

"That time we first talked five years ago," I reminded her, "I was ready to jump off that ledge because of my family problems, until you convinced me otherwise, whether you meant to or not. Until you showed me an alternative, that there are things in life which make it worthwhile. And look at everything I've accomplished since. I'm telling you Takasaki, you're unique, you're brilliant even if you try your best not to show it to fit in. I know you can do a hundred times as much as me, things I can't even imagine! If I really love you, the least I could do is repay the favor."

"Then I'm sorry. I prefer incompleteness to perpetuating this inconsistency between you and Neji-kun" she added.

She pointed the gun at her heart, before deciding her stupid, overthinking brain held more responsibility. That useless organ which kept calculating, computing, balancing costs and feasibility and reasons not to. If only she were stupid enough to love Nejima without regard for the consequences, or smart enough not to fall in love with him at all.

She rested the cool, metal barrel against the temple of her head.

"What about everyone else!" I protested. "What about your family?".

"They don't care," she answered.

"What about your friends?".

"They'll only pretend to care."

"Nejima?".

Takasaki took a moment to compose her answer. "It'll hurt for a while, but I think it'll be better for him in the long run if he moves on and finds happiness with Ririna."

"…what about me?" I "I love you Takasaki-san. There's nothing in it for the long run for me, there's nothing I wouldn't give up to at least see you smile just one more time, even if it isn't at me. I know you don't love me back, and I'm not asking you to, but isn't knowing how I feel in my heart enough for you to at least not murder the woman I love? I promise I'll do my best to show you that life is worth living!".

She exhaled and lowered her gun.

"Reader-kun," she began.

She had come too far. Her brain pressed her to finish the inexorable task she had already embarked, the moment she opened her mouth and lied to Nejima.

"…Goodbye."

She lifted the gun once more and pressed it firmly against the side of her head, so she would have no chance of missing. At least she wouldn't ruin her pretty face, for anyone who would still care afterwards.

"TAKASAKI!" I screamed.

She squeezed the trigger.

Click.

She shook it, examined it. Jammed.

Tossing it aside as it bounced against the ground, she curled up against the wall and tears rolled down her already inflamed face.

"Takasaki-san," my somber voice leaked out of the phone, "you don't need a boyfriend. You need professional help."

"Please don't report me, or I'll find some other way right now," she pleaded. "I don't want people to think…"

"I can make the appointments under my name and we can go together. I'll just say you're going to support me, and nobody has to know. Promise me?".

"I don't know…"

"Promise me."

Takasaki sighed. She sat alone on this floor with nothing but a broken firearm and the disembodied voice of Reader and a relationship she broke with Nejima. For the first time, thanks to all the final cleaning she had performed before her planned end, her mind had all the throbbing clarity of someone with nothing left to do in the world. "I don't want this anymore."

She made a wide gesture to no one in particular. "I don't want to be trapped in this defective life anymore," she pleaded.

"There's a way to escape that doesn't involve escaping the 'life' part," I offered.

"I can't see how."

"Process of elimination - get out of the 'defective' part."

"That's not possible."

"I'll show you how it's possible."

Silence.

"How?".

"Promise me," I asked once again.

"…ok then. I'll try my best"

Takasaki stood up.

* * *

Author's Note: Some manga context for this chapter: in the manga, Takasaki has some terrible major secret she won't tell Nejima that she feels prevents a full relationship. It's still not revealed in canon, so I just used my imagination. The Nejima parts of this chapter draw from two existing scenes in the manga (first date and Christmas party arcs).

This fic is a work of fiction: if you feel like you're in Takasaki's situation, please get help.

See disclaimer in chapter 1.


	9. Quod Era Demonstrandum

_A year later_

The marmalade-tinted morning sun rays streamed through the school kitchen's window, seeping into the colorless smooth countertops and appliances. They danced and flitted around the specks of dust that hang in the still air. Disturbed only by the shrill shuffling of metal trays and a whispy, hummed rendition of some tranquil classical music piece in the otherwise deserted school. Her hair shimmered and swayed as she glided back and forth, surveying the arrayed utensils. She nudged one of the trays until it exactly paralleled the edge of the counter, kneeling a bit to check and make sure.

_"__Did we have to do this the morning of the school festival?"_ I grumbled to myself. _"Night before would have been a heck of a lot better."_

Not at spending time alone with Takasaki, of course. Rather, I wasn't a morning person, and the weight in my bag that pulled down my shoulder only further drove home that point. Leaning against the doorframe, I waved at Takasaki, only failing to catch her attention. She thumbed a few buttons on the oven, and they beeped each time.

"Good morning, Takasaki-san!".

My voice still shook with some lingering trepidation, and I couldn't believe myself.

For her part, her hummed tune screeched to a halt and she turned around. She had donned a pink apron over her school uniform, and she looked so motherly. It was easy for me to forget at times that she was still destined as my Yukari-assigned wife. That we would share a life together, maybe raise children together. Even despite the government notice, it all seemed so distant. True, she had never made any motion to annul it, but despite all the conversations the two of us had shared in the past few months, she seemed no closer as a girlfriend, let alone as some sort of fiancee. The two of us had still never told anyone outside of our families - at least, as far as I knew - and she had never brought the topic up again since that day. Any time someone asked me whether I had received my notice, I would give a weak laugh and people would know the answer without prying for further impolite details.

People noticed the two of us had begun to spend a lot of time together. More than usual for a guy and a girl, less than usual for a couple. Nejima had even pulled me aside a few times early on. I didn't know the truth myself, or what to say, so I would mutter "it's nothing," and believed it and slunk away from his sad, confused face. One always had to round down half of a relationship.

"Ah, Reader-kun!" she returned in her usual cheery greeting, relieving me of my grocery haul and setting it on the kitchen counter. Flawless and clean, as I expected of her. Just like her. "You took extra care of the eggs, right?".

I nodded in response. "I got it all double-bagged, for good measure," I added.

"That's not good for the environment." She wagged a finger at me, and I found the scolding kind of cute. I joined her in helping unpack the ingredients.

"At least it was paper and not plastic. What were you humming just now, by the way?" I asked. "It sounded very beautiful, and relaxing."

"_Gymnopédies_ by Satie," she recited in her best French. Best being not good at all.

"Wow, you know quite a bit about that. I have to say I'm a bit jealous."

"Not as much as you think," she demurred. She struggled to pull apart a bag of sugar in a clean fashion, so I reached over and tore the top. I tilted the heavy sack into a glass bowl and poured out a small mound.

"Hm, a bit more?" she requested, and I dispensed a bit more onto the small granular hill.

"How'd you learn about it?" I continued.

"I used to play the violin in middle school," she explained. "I was never any good though. Always in the back, no matter how hard I practiced every day. Meanwhile I'd always look at the concertmaster get all the love and attention. So I quit."

"Orchestras are all about group effort."

"I suppose. I guess that's just the sort of person I am," she answered with a meaningless laugh. "Did you ever play an instrument, Reader-kun?".

"Yeah, cello, back in middle school."

"Same reason?".

I nodded, and reached for one of the eggs. So did she, and our pinkies bumped against each other. I retracted mine and blushed away, while she grabbed the egg and cracked it against the edge of the bowl and refused to acknowledge whatever had just happened.

She flashed a smile at me. "I guess we're both not used to not winning."

The first time she had went to counseling with me, she fidgeted all over the couch, looking over her shoulder as if someone watched her. She actually did mention she thought someone from the Ministry, a guy named Anekawa, watched over her and Nejima. Certainly not in this banal, carpeted room with a closed door, however, and I tried to reassure her as much. She had made the therapist swear up and down not to tell anyone anything. Satisfied after the third round of this charade, she finally spilled everything.

Cruel guy friends and cruel girl friends. Her so-called loved ones. Her uncaring mother. The abuse, the humiliation, the daily sandpaper of put-downs and ignominies and worse that ground away at her every day, until only the shell of her former self remained. She strung a frayed yarn from one part of her life to the next over the course of multiple sessions.

Nejima. How she wasn't his assigned. How he seemed to look at Ririna in a slightly different way every day, especially after that hot springs trip. How sure she was that the one happiness she might otherwise have been allowed in her life, her one raison d'être for her life, seemed to slip away every passing moment. And so did her life.

I had once heard from one of her friends that she had never seen her cry. I found that hard to believe, in my cumulative personal experience with her. I almost felt bad for the therapist, who had to wash out the stains on his pillows.

Her father.

I didn't know what else to say at the time, but I also broke down. I talked about my mother for the first time to someone else, the real side of my mother. I knew it didn't compare to what Takasaki went through, but I wanted to do anything I could to make her feel less alone. How convoluted - these sessions weren't for me, but I ended up as a participant anyway. The two of us almost forgot about the therapist as we shared our pasts with each other, crying together.

I found her holding my hand then, almost out of blind instinctual need for human contact than any specific desire. Despite how I felt about it, I thought it the most inappropriate time to mention anything about it.

I shook my head out of the memories, to see a smiling Takasaki humming to herself as she mixed the batter with a spatula. Birds joined in to chirp alongside her from beyond the window. By now, some fellow students had come to help set up their own class festival activities and chatted outside, livening up the school.

She hadn't cried in months. Her distant, perfect smiles and easygoing attitude, it all appeared so normal. Just how she looked to me before I had confessed to her and we two had gotten our notice. Reverting to the past wasn't exactly the future I wanted, but compared to the recent alternative, seeing such a quotidian Takasaki made me happy.

"Yeah, we really are the high-roller types at heart, aren't we?" I confirmed her last statement. "I guess we're more similar than either of us ever imagined."

I grabbed the sack of flour and popped it open. It took a bit more force than I anticipated. When it opened, it floofed out a cloud that prompted me to cough and squeeze my eyes shut.

"Oh, Reader-kun!" Takasaki called out, setting down the bowl and getting a towel. She dabbed it under the sink and wiped my face with it. "You look just like a geisha!".

_Cough_. "Do I?" I asked.

Takasaki laughed in response, and not the brief awkwardness-smoother kind either. A real one.

"You know, you look like one of my little step-brothers trying to help me out at home. That always happens to Itsuki."

"Hehe, I guess that's good," I responded, patting my face to detect any traces of powder. "Thanks for that."

"No problem." She handed me the bowl and the spatula. "This is the part where it's good to have a guy helping me - I'm going to pour in the chocolate chips, I need you to stir them in in a folding motion, like this," demonstrating once for me with a visible struggle.

"OK," I acquiesced. One fold, and I realized just how thick and heavy the batter had become to turn over like that.

"We'll only need to do it a few more times," she declared as she funneled in more chips out of a bag. My arm ached by the time I was done, although with still enough strength to lift out the spatula. I swiped my finger through the end, gaining a streak of raw cookie dough, and dropped it in my mouth.

"That's unsanitary!" Takasaki called out, her cheeks reddening.

"What, I'll wash my hands after this." I directed the spatula at her. "You've never done it before? Why don't you give it a try?".

"Please get it away from me," she protested, backing away and pushing away my hand. "If you're not careful you'll get it on my school uniform."

"You're the one wearing the apron," I pointed out. "Come on, what's the point of baking cookies if you don't even lick the raw dough once?".

I stared down into Takasaki's clarion, lake-colored eyes for a few moments, when she loosened up and relented.

"OK, maybe I'll give it a try." She tried to pinch out a glob when, after a brief examination of her smooth unpainted fingernails, she opted to use a plastic spoon instead.

She grinned and nodded. "It tastes just like the kind they use in the ice cream, actually."

"See what I mean?". I handed her and myself an ice cream scoop each. She sprayed the trays with a quick layer of non-stick, and I scooped out some dough from the bowl and plopped them on top. She joined me, although she took the time to try to mold some of them. A heart so round it looked more like a mathematical cardioid in polar coordinates, and an attempt at an outline of a butterfly that ended up more like a Lorenz attractor.

She noticed my glances at her clumsy work, "I can dream, alright?".

Now it was my turn to laugh. "Don't worry, I think they look cute."

Takasaki smiled and tilted her head, her hair rocking with the movement.

"I'm going to go change right now, can you handle putting the cookies in the oven?" she asked. "Make sure to use these mitts."

"Sure thing," I answered, as she hung up the apron and sprinted out of the room. I put on the mitts she gave me and slid the tray into the pre-heated oven.

"Wait, how long am I supposed to put them in for?" I poked my head out the door and called after her, but she was already gone.

"Hmm, ten minutes is probably fine," I muttered to myself. "I guess I can just keep a watch on them and play it by eye."

Resting against the oven, I whipped out my phone and caught up on my Facebook group chat messages.

Michiru: "Bringing my boyfriend today to the school festival, hope you guys get a chance to meet him! He's a real cutey!"

Michiru: "Oh Reader heard you're alone with Takasaki helping her ;)"

I wasn't really sure how and whether to respond to that, but in either case I rather she had said that in direct message instead of to the group.

Koharu: "Physics team should really do a club thing for this next year, it'll be our last year"

Koharu: "My class is doing a haunted house AGAIN rly?".

Michiru: "Mine is doing a maid cafe LOL"

Koharu: "Are you dressing up? :P"

Michiru: "Baka! :("

Michiru: "What would your Yukari partner think if she read that?"

Sasahara had left the entire conversation on read. Probably the smartest maneuver.

"Reader-kun?".

The unmistakable note rang with the purity of a reverberating tuning fork, splitting my inner thoughts in twain. I looked up to find Takasaki waving at me, and I almost fall over.

The wide sleeves flared out of her white yukata, the floor-length narrow dress patterned with the designs of blue roses in full bloom and enrobing her lithe body. A grape-colored sash held the outfit together, tied in a large bow in the back like a birthday present for me. A gentle arc of hydrangea flowers, the color of clear noon sky, dangled from the side of her head.

What was a charged black hole called again? Reissner-Nordström? Because I was sure that much beauty concentrated in one place had to collapse into an electric singularity. I had never seen Takasaki in a yukata before, and the sight did not disappoint. I only regretted she couldn't wear it every day.

"How do I look~?" she asked in a purring tone and with a playful, even haughty, grin. She closed her eyes and flicked her short black hair with a dismissive hand, the bouncy strands seeming to hang in the air for a moment.

"Ummm…" I mumbled, blushing. "You shouldn't ask rhetorical questions, Takasaki-san."

She laughed into her hands and dropped the act. "Glad to know, just double checking." She fiddled with the bow behind her. "I'm just hoping I put it on right."

"Why are you wearing it, if I might ask? Not that I mind, of course - I think, um, it looks quite lovely, if I'm allowed to say."

"Are you really so surprised the class voted to have me stand outside and advertise our bake sale?" she tittered.

"Makes sense," I acknowledged, when I realized that in my enrapturement with her new look I had completely forgotten -

"The cookies!" I exclaimed, twisting the oven dial back to zero and yanking open the door. I slid on the pair of mitts and extracted the trays inside. The brown lumps at least didn't look charred on the edges, unlike the last attempt at baking I saw out of Takasaki, but they didn't exactly convey appetizing desire either.

"Whoops," Takasaki covered her mouth. "At least it turned out better than usual. I guess your help must have prevented the worst."

"Maybe if we discount them, people will still buy them?" I suggested.

"Well, I don't think people go to a school festival with high-quality baked goods at a reasonable price first on their mind."

She started prying the cookies off with a spatula and into ziplock bags. "Anyway, we can make up for it in presentation. Katou-san brought some pretty red ribbons we can use for the baggies. Could you help me take these to the classroom?".

"Yeah, of course," I replied. Anything I could do to help Takasaki.

I scooped up a few of them in my arms and headed out alongside Takasaki into the hallway. Bright paper garlands festooned the ceiling and other students milled back and forth around us with boxes of supplies. Even in the distance I could hear the school band practicing on the field.

I heard a few whispers, but I ignored them.

When I reached the classroom, the desks were draped in white cloth and almost entirely covered in pastries and tarts and croissants. Several of her classmates crouched in the corner, coloring a few flashy cardboard signs. One of Takasaki's friends, a tall blonde named Aioi, rushed out to greet her.

"Oh, Takasaki-san, I'm so glad you could help," she exclaimed.

"Yeah, no problem," Takasaki waved off, as she and I handed over the cookies. "They, um, well, I'm sure they'll make a fine addition!".

"Yeah, thanks!" Aioi expressed again.

"Sure, any time. I'd love to stay and help here, but Reader-kun and I have to clean up the kitchen. We'll be right back!"

Even though they didn't bake perfectly, I could see a broad grin across her face as the two of us exited the classroom and reentered the hectic hallway.

"You know, even if I'm not so good at it, it's still fun to actually make something with your own hands. I'm glad you could help."

"Oh yeah, I'm glad too," I answered. "I'd be happy to do something like that any time with you."

"Misaki!" a girly voice called out.

"Hm?" Takasaki turned, when her eyes widened.

"Misaki!" Ririna yelled again, holding Nejima's hand. Nisaka sulked besides them, his luscious plum-colored bangs swishing about in front of his obscure eyes and his hands in his pockets.

Ririna. Holding Nejima's hand.

Takasaki tried to croak a greeting out in response, but her voice just scratched.

"Oh, Misaki, your yukata is so beautiful!" Ririna complimented. She wore her typical atypical gothic lolita fashion. "I kept trying to reach you for the past few weeks but you won't answer! We should totally go to the summer festival and then we can all wear our yukatas together!".

"Um, yeah, good to see you again too, Riri-chan," Takasaki's voice halted out.

A few people stopped and stared at the odd reunion.

"Maybe we shouldn't stand in the middle of the hall like this," I offered. "We're blocking egress."

Takasaki kept staring at Nejima and Ririna holding hands, and couldn't bear to look away.

"Nejima-kun…" she started. I could see a million thoughts balancing off the tip of her tongue, ready to fall over, as her brain churned through the possibilities for the single optimal one to express in this moment.

Nejima let go, more tossed aside, Ririna's hand. He swallowed a lump in his throat, pulled at his collar, and leaned forward as he does as if about to declare something.

Nisaka looked her over, then glanced at me, and shattered the crystallized awkwardness. "How's things going with the new boyfriend?".

That was it. Takasaki grabbed the hook of my arm and sprinted faster than I thought possible in her sandals back to the kitchen, almost tripping me in the process. If anything, I was more concerned she might. I thought I could hear a teacher calling out after us not to run in the hallway, but she didn't care about anything else in the world besides putting more between us two and them.

Panting, she slammed the door shut behind us two, rested against, and collapsed to the floor, the skirt of her yukata crumpling with her legs.

"I guess," she breathed out, "it was inevitable."

"It didn't have to be," I countered, kneeling beside her.

"I'm happy for Nejima. It's better for him to just go with the system. It's better for everyone, really," she rationalized more to herself than to me.

"What about you?" I asked.

She looked away.

She said nothing for ten, long seconds.

She exhaled.

She looked into my eyes. They were wide open, arctic blue swirling in conclusions and resignation and yet what appeared like a little bit of relief.

"I think," she began.

My heart was starting to race in a way it hadn't for months. Oh sure, being next to Takasaki transmitted a certain amount of ambient anxiousness that crushes always did. But whatever she said this in moment, whatever answer she provided to this question, I somehow knew I would remember for the rest of my life.

She put her hand against mine, before extruding her fingers through mine and interlacing them.

"I think, it's better for me too. If we…if we had a more normal relationship."

I couldn't believe what I heard, and I wondered if I misinterpreted them. Her words did seem kind of ambiguous, but the accompanying action did not.

"I'm sorry for taking your feelings on such a ride," she apologized.

"It's…I mean, it's not really okay, but I didn't want anyone else. I was willing to wait."

"You know, my class put on a Romeo and Juliet play last year for the school festival," she mentioned, almost out of nowhere.

"Oh, you must have made a fine Juliet," I commented.

"Hm, that's what everyone says, although it was actually a gender-reversed version, so I played Romeo," she corrected.

She leaned in closer, until I could almost feel her breath against my face.

"The truth is, Reader-kun, I can't be your Juliet. I don't think I ever can be. But I can be your Lady Macbeth."

"Hm." I thought back to the Takasaki on the rooftop, orating to no one and everyone. "That's as good of a confession as I'd ever expect to hear."

"Remember what you said on our first date? 'We can do better. We'd make a great team'?" she quoted.

I nodded.

"You're exceptional, Reader-kun, and really smart, and nice, and everything else someone would want. I'd like to think I am too. I think we can achieve what we each want, together. So I'd like to take you up on your offer. I'll ignore my heart and make the wrong decision, so that some day no one will ever have to again."

Sometimes, I wondered whether the Yukari system might be too smart, too perceptive of people for its own good. I would have never really met Takasaki otherwise, never had a chance to learn just how much we two shared in history and personality. If I had already admired her as a distant beauty, those commonalities only made it burn brighter.

"Am I allowed to say it?" I asked. "For real, this time?".

Takasaki nodded.

"I love you."

Takasaki closed her eyes, and I followed the cue. She draped one of her wide sleeves over my shoulder and dragged me towards her, until I could taste her cherry lip gloss.

Nothing too wild, but fireworks nonetheless went off in my head as my dream finally came true in her embrace.

The two of us separated our lips, still holding hands, when Takasaki half-opened her eyes and looked into mine.

"And I'll try my best, Reader-kun."

_Q.E.D._

* * *

Author's Note: This is the last "main" chapter, however I'll be posting one epilogue chapter after this, so I'll save the champagne popping for then.


	10. Love is a Condorcet Cycle

_Decades later_

"Daddy! Daddy!".

I looked up from my iPad tablet to see my little daughter running up to me with her small arms around a massive plush stegosaurus. A faint "Jingle Bell Rock" played from speakers hidden by the wreaths and garlands, as I sat and waited on a rocking horse several sizes too small for me. The heater was on too strong and I debated taking the jacket off my suit and tie before it began to swelter. A small kid-sized Christmas tree lit up the department store's kid's corner as I had waited for my kid to pick something. Beyond the windows I could see streets bustling with other shoppers.

She dropped the dinosaur and put on a cross look on her face, arms crossed.

"Daddy, you're not paying attention. Are you looking at those squiggly lines again?".

I closed out the incriminating stock market quoting app and tapped something random.

_"__If it's a boy, we'll name him Neji. And if it's a girl, we'll name her…"_

"Well, Lily-chan, it's important for dad's work," I tried to explain.

"I don't see why squiggly lines are more important than me," Lily pouted in her cute little green dress. The style wouldn't look out of place among Santa's elves, come to think.

I set the iPad down. I hated seeing Lily upset, it almost looked as if I had made my wife upset too. "Aw, sweetie, they're not. Of course mommy and I think you're the most important in the world."

I ruffled her hair, the light glinting off the diamond on my ring finger. She had her mother's beautiful, shiny black hair, albeit much longer than the latter ever wore it. They even curled up at the ends just like hers. Her eyes are my eyes, though, and sometimes looking into them felt like a mirror.

"Now," I steered back the conversation, pointing to the stuffed animal on the ground. "That's quite a big one, isn't it? Aren't you a bit old for stuffed animals, though?".

"Well…" she looked to the ground, twisting her body and flailing her arms back and forth. She hadn't figured out how to tell a convincing lie yet, and she knew it, and I could see her debating within herself on what to say next.

"I can tell you," she said, "but you have to promise not to tell mommy."

"Why not?".

"Mommy works for the government," Lily stated.

"Uh oh," I intoned in my serious voice. "Did you get in trouble at school?".

"No, no!" she disclaimed, waving her hands. "But, um, it's um…"

"OK, I promise I won't tell her," I declared, my curiosity clawing for whatever my child so wanted to tell me. Lily cupped her hand over my ear, and said it in such a low voice I had to ask her to repeat it.

"I don't really want a Christmas present," she whispered.

"Oh," I began, turning, "isn't that a good thi - "

"Um…I want to get something for…um, there's this boy in my class."

I grinned, and looked at her. She fidgeted in nervousness, looking at her feet, unsure of what I would think.

"I know he likes dinosaurs," she added.

"That's not a bad thing at all," I judged.

"It's against the law!" she cried in resignation, stamping a foot. "It's just not fair."

I can't help myself, and laughed a little. "You know, Lily-chan, you should _really_ talk about this with mommy."

"Mommy says people have to follow the law on TV," she protested.

I brushed a lock of hair by the side of Lily's face. "Sometimes, mommy has to say things she doesn't really believe on TV to keep her job."

"Isn't that lying?" Lily pointed out. "You and mommy tell me not to lie."

"Ummm…" She had a good point, and I couldn't really answer in a curt, comprehensible way for her age. "You shouldn't because when kids lie it's generally bad. But mommy's job sometimes involves lying to make things better. It's hard and you'll learn later."

"I want to learn now!" she demanded.

"Then pay attention in school and get good grades, I guess," I dismissed. Then you lower your voice, almost conspiratorial.

"You know, Lily-chan?" I murmured, "Mommy once loved someone too."

"You mean, outside the Yukari system?" Lily asked, incredulous eyes widening. "No way!".

I nodded, when my phone vibrated.

"The IMF wants an advance copy of your remarks at Davos next month," I heard someone say in the distance.

The click of high heels. "Tell them I'll send it tomorrow," in that unmistakable, melodious voice.

Misaki Takasaki walked in, flanked by two sunglasses and headset-clad aides lugging briefcases spilling out with paper. Not much had changed over the many years. She had swapped her school uniform for a professional blazer and pencil skirt and heels. A single shock of stressed grey streaked through the side of her hair, and a careful observer could see her hands shake a bit. Even the pressures and the years, however, had spared her beautiful face and that irresistible smile.

"The North Korean delegation will be in Tokyo in two days," the other aide pointed out.

Takasaki put up a hand and turned to them. "Can't I just take some time to watch my kid grow up? Otherwise what's all this for?". She gestured first to Lily, then outside.

The aides nodded, bowed, and retreated. "Yes, madame Foreign Secretary."

"Misaki!" I called out, leaping to hug her and peck her on the cheek. "I was so nervous about what was happening, I'm so happy you're safe! What happened out there? Aren't you supposed to be at the G20 summit?".

"We had to cancel the treaty signing due to the…climate change protests outside. I knew we should have disinvited the Americans," Takasaki explained. "I'm safe, don't worry."

She turned to Lily, crouching down to eye level with her and pinching her cheek. "Anyway, that's not important. What about you, Lily, how's my awesome little girl doing? Have you picked out a Christmas present for yourself yet?".

"Ummm…" Lily trailed, then diverted the subject. "Oh, you know, daddy said you loved someone! Is that true?".

"Lily!" I called out. Takasaki shot me a look, then restored her usual graceful smile.

"Your daddy and I love each other very much," she asserted. She punctuated the declaration by holding my hand. "And we both love you very much, Lily-chan."

"Is it true, though?" Lily pressed on.

"First, why did daddy tell you?" she asked. "Do you love someone, Lily-chan?".

Lily looked outside the window again, shuffling her hands together. "…Yes. There's this boy in my class who's really nice to me. I want to buy him something for Christmas instead of me."

Takasaki smiled.

"Am I in trouble now mom?".

"Of course not," Takasaki reassured, ruffling Lily's hair. "You know, when I was around your age, I fell in love with a boy too."

"I knew it! I bet he was cute, too!" Lily exclaimed. "But you didn't pick him! Does that mean I still have to follow the Yukari Law?".

"I had to make that decision," Takasaki admitted. "Your daddy is a wonderful person. For someone to share my life with, he and I really helped each other achieve more than we thought possible. And he gave me you."

Takasaki pinched Lily's cheek again, and the latter winced at the gesture.

"He's smart, and kind. I felt so alone before I met him - someone like me, someone who lived through the same things I did. I don't regret it, and I wouldn't take it back for a second."

I smiled at the compliments. "I agree," I added, "and I could say the same things about your mother."

Takasaki knelt and rested a hand on Lily's shoulder. I figured I should join as well, and wrap mine around her other one.

"But I promise you, Lily-chan, you won't have to make the same decision."

* * *

Author's Note: It's done! Finally! Apologies for the delay, IRL got in the way, but I'm so happy I finally completed my first multichapter fic! It was quite a ride writing this whole thing personally, and I hope you enjoyed it as much as I did.

So in the manga bonus chapter 139.5 set in the future (don't worry, it doesn't have relationship spoilers), Takasaki says she grew up to be a "secretary". I just interpreted what that means with a lot of latitude. The contrast between our adolescent and adult selves, the compromises we make to one day attain what we won't compromise on.

Disclaimer in chapter 1.

Thanks for reading!


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